“Don’t be in such a rush, young Mr. Bass,” Able Guthrie warned. “There’s far more to life than the push and shove of folks when they get all crowded together, more to living than the hurly-burly of wine and song and the great trouble all that can bring a man.”
“Able Guthrie! Leave this young’un alone,” Lottie snapped as Marissa came to the table with the skillet still sizzling with more than a dozen eggs popping in hot grease. She settled on a bench opposite Bass.
“Just giving Titus his due, as I would warn and watch over my own son, missus.”
“Just like you keep me from ever knowing anything about St. Lou,” Marissa suddenly spoke up.
“Many are the times I think I done the wrong thing to come across the river to set down new roots here—just after the earth shook more’n two year back,” the settler grumped. “The farther away from that sin hole, the better, you ask me.”
She leaned toward Titus as if exchanging a confidence. “My pa claims the devil makes his home right up there in St. Louis.”
“He truly does!” Guthrie bawled, dragging some eggs out of the skillet, piercing the fat yellow yolks in the process. “And that’s a fact.”
Just looking at those fried eggs made Titus’s mouth water with an unaccustomed tang.
“Hush and let the boy eat his breakfast,” Lottie scolded. “You gonna go off and work him so hard, then I say, hush: let him have a minute’s peace to put away all this food and ’llow it settle in his stomach.”
“Maybe you’re right, woman,” Able said, grinning at Titus. “We treat this young man good, I might just get more’n just a day’s work out of him. Might talk him into staying on so’s I got a extra hand to see that barn gets built before he skedaddles off north to see all the devil’s temptations what wait up in St. Lou.”
“You hush yourself and eat, Able,” she scolded.
The settler grumped under his breath, but spoke not another word as Marissa slid Titus’s tin cup toward her, pouring him some foamy, cream-rich milk from a dented pewter pitcher. That hand of hers she had wrapped round the cup lingered a moment too long in passing it to the visitor, just long enough that his roughened, callused fingers brushed hers as he took it from her. She’d pulled back as if she was scalded, then shyly looked up from her hand to peer across the table at him from beneath some of those chestnut curls spilling across her great, round calf eyes.
He had sensed the sudden flight of tiny wings across his belly. Bass swallowed hard, all but choking on the bacon he had just bitten off. “I … I think I might just do that, Mr. Guthrie,” he forced the words out, almost embarrassed as he turned to look at the settler. “Might like to hang on a while and help out with raising your barn.”
How he liked the way those calf eyes sparkled when he said that to her father, how one side of her pale, pink lips curved up in just the faintest hint of satisfaction. It was as if she were admitting to what he had just then owned up to. And that would mean moving St. Louie to the back of the fire for now—off the hottest of the coals. Way he was feeling right about then, Titus figured this girl mayhaps would make the delay worth any cost in days, or weeks, or even months….
“I asked if you was coming down to breakfast or not, Titus,” Abie’s voice cracked through his reverie, dissipating his remembrance of that first morning he happened on the Guthrie place.
Yanked back to the present, Bass kicked his way out of the covers and reached for his britches, pulling them over his bare legs.
“Coming, Mr. Guthrie.”
“That mean today?”
“Now, sir,” he said, crow-hopping his britches up his legs.
He so enjoyed lying naked with her, his legs pressed against hers, locked around hers, the two of them knotted within a tangle of heat and perspiration as they struggled together nearly every one of these short, hot summer nights. A strong tingle twitched through his groin now, stirred just by thinking about Marissa and the pleasure her body gave his.
He pulled his working shirt from the peg driven into the beam right over his makeshift bed and dragged it over his head. A yoked, drop-shoulder shirt with three bone buttons in front. She had made it for him, sewn it with her own hands, having dyed the tow cloth a pale buckskin color from crushed walnut shells. It smelled strongly of him from that first day, all sweat and dust and fresh-sawed lumber, even some hint of the animals in the paddock below. The honest, earthy smells of a settler.
Heading for the ladder, Titus listened to the wood thrush singing of late summer and decided what smell he liked best was hers. The heated eagerness of her these brief, sultry nights as summer reached its peak. The taste of her sweat trapped in that small cleft at the bottom of her throat. The hot earthiness of her mouth once he had taught her how to kiss back with her tongue and her teeth, her lips scampering all over his body like a ravenous beast he had unleashed within this lonely settler’s girl.
She was waiting on the porch for him that morning. And Lottie stood in the doorway, just as she did every morning.
From the look Mrs. Guthrie had been giving him these past few days, it was certain the woman had already figured out how her daughter felt about this young stranger who had wandered into their lives last spring. Lottie’s warm smile this morning said it all, said how she approved of Marissa’s choice.
“They been fighting north of us for some time now,” Guthrie declared that late-summer evening when they gathered in the cool of twilight.
“You getting worried for us, Able?” Lottie asked from her chore of setting a new hackle on the spinning wheel.
“No,” the settler admitted. “Not with St. Louis north of us. Chances are slim that place will ever fall in British hands even if them redcoats and their Injuns come down the Mississip.”
“My grandpap fought the British,” Titus explained. “Back to Kentucky. They sent the Injuns down on the settlers then too.”
“Oh, dear,” Lottie exclaimed a bit breathlessly.
Guthrie shot Titus a severe, disapproving look before he turned to his wife. “It’s a different time, dear. And a different place now. My own pa fought against the soldiers of the British crown just afore he come back home to marry my ma. No, them redcoats and their cutthroat Injuns can run all over hell up there on the lakes—”
“Able!”
“Sorry, Lottie,” he apologized. “They can run all over that north country they want to, it ain’t gonna do ’em a bit of good.”
“Your pa and me heard yesterday the talk from that neighbor of your’n,” Titus said to Marissa. “There’s word of the Britishers landing at the mouth of the Messessap.”
“New Orleans?” Marissa asked of that evening, the air filled with the joyous calls of whippoorwills and scritch of the katydids, noisy of a summer night, along with the soft but reassuring clang of the old cow’s bell down in the paddock. She turned to tell her mother, “Titus told me all about New Orleans.”
Lottie’s eyes widened in disapproving exasperation as she glanced at her husband.
“Yes,” Able replied. “Word was that folks fear the redcoats gonna attack New Orleans.”
Exuberantly, Titus added, “Which means them Britishers likely to try squeezing us atween ’em.”
“From the north up there at the big lakes with all their wild and bloody Injuns,” Guthrie said. “And now from the south.”
“Where they just might get them Chickasaws and the rest to join their fight agin the Americans,” Titus added as he set the peg he had just whittled into the Cumberland basket with all the rest he had finished that night.
Instead of what frontier folks called an “Indian basket”—one made of cane splints or even grass stalks—the Cumberland was woven of white-oak splits, the very same material the pioneer used to weave chaif bottoms, that oak peeled in the spring at the same season he peeled his hickory bark.
Sitting atop split-log benches on the narrow porch, Titus and Able worked beneath the light of two candle lanterns, each of them carving out a different size of peg. Like expensive, hand-forged nails, these oak pegs were used for all sorts of construction and repair on the frontier farms.
Nearly every evening the males all along the border country spent their last few hours after supper and before retiring to bed repairing wood and leather farm equipment, if not whittling the pegs they would use in making those repairs to buckets and kegs, yokes and plows. Whittling at pegs as well as buttons for the barn door, grainmill
