Slapping his knee, the farmer exclaimed, “I’ll be damned!”
“Able Guthrie!” Lottie scolded.
“Oh, hush now, woman. I been minding my mouth long enough that I’m due a damn now and again!” He twisted on his half-log bench to gaze at Titus wonderingly. “So you know something of Injuns, do you?”
“Not near enough,” Bass replied with a disarming smile. Then he remembered. “What I didn’t know almost got me kill’t in Chickasaw country four years back.”
Guthrie rocked against the cabin’s wall, gesturing with his knife at the youth. “Just my point, son. Just my point. Don’t you ever forget it. No matter how right or wrong you are in them Injuns invading us here in this country … you just remember that as soon as a fella thinks he’s got an Injun figured out, that fella’s made him a big mistake.”
That made immediate sense, sinking in the way it did all at once. He grinned back at Guthrie. “I do believe them are words a man can live by, sir. An Injun is a real uncertain critter. Yes, sir. An Injun is a most uncertain critter.”
“You ever said anything to your ma about us?”
He sensed Marissa’s hair glide across the bare skin of his chest, that flesh feeling a little tighter now as the sweat dried.
“No, I ain’t said a word.”
“She knows.”
“I know she knows,” Marissa replied, then fell quiet for a time, and finally added, “I guess a mother always does know when her only daughter falls in love.”
He wondered how it felt to be so completely swallowed up in love like she was, like he was afraid to be. He lay there listening to the cicadas and the peeping of the tree frogs, and her breathing against his chest. The sweet, heady fragrance of forsythia and redbuds exuded a delicate perfume on the air. A few yards away the thick, verdant woods abounded with violets and wild plum having just come to bloom.
“You think she knows you’re slipping out to come see me most ever’ night now?”
“She can’t help but know, Titus,” Marissa answered. “There’s just something atween a woman and her daughter what I can’t put into words. But one woman always knows when another woman’s in love.”
“How ’bout your pa?”
“Him? He’s a sleeper. A hard sleeper. Works hard every day, so he needs his sleep every night. Not like ma. She don’t get much rest anymore. Last few months. Something’s changed with her—but she won’t own up to it for me. But I know she gets real weary and that sometimes she ain’t sleeping when I come slipping out to see you here. Times I know she’s already awake when I go sneaking back in afore first light.”
“How you feel about that?” he asked, already knowing how he felt: more scared of hurting those good people who had taken him in than he was scared in facing any punishment meted out for dallying with their daughter’s heart.
“If she knows about us and ain’t said anything to me—I figure she don’t have a problem with it. Any way you look at it, my ma’s give us her blessing.”
“Blessing,” he echoed in a low whisper, knowing what Marissa meant.
“I ain’t never asked you if you love me,” she finally whispered against his chest, “even though I been telling you my feelings for some time now.”
“I told you I’d say the words when I knowed I could say ’em.”
“And I always told you that’s fine by me.”
She brushed her fingers across his belly, nails scratching across the bony prominence of one hipbone where the skin was stretched taut. He twitched. It was almost a tickle, but not quite. Something more urgent, deeper and less easily stilled than a tickle that she aroused in him with her wandering touch. As little as she had known about her body and the way of men when they had first grappled in the hay one hot night back in June, Marissa sure had made up for lost time with how she threw herself into their coupling. Some folks was just natural-born riders, or swimmers, maybe even runners. But to Titus, Marissa Guthrie was a natural-born humper. Unashamedly she hungered for him every bit as much as he hungered for her. Time and again he had studied at that cloudy piece of mirror Lottie had given him to keep in the barn for shaving, searching for the telltale bite marks and bruises Marissa had left during her exuberant coupling.
Of a time or two he had even grown scared she would wake up her parents in the nearby cabin, moaning so loud the way she did, mingling her passion with an uninhibited shriek every now and again. But still Lottie never said anything about her daughter’s noise, and Able was likely too tired to hear.
The past few days they had labored long and hard. He and Guthrie had been finishing up splitting some shakes for the cabin’s roof—working fast against the coming of autumn’s harvest and another onslaught of winter. For the past two winters the Guthries had lived beneath a roof constructed of rough-sawed boards jointed with oakum to seal the seams as best the man could. Boards Able had cut into six-foot lengths and laid in overlapping rows, held in place with long, straight saplings called butting poles he pegged down by their ends to roof joists.
Folks along the frontier were always quick to learn the superstitious rites so much a part of working with native woods: a roof board rived on a waning moon would curl; a cedar post would rot before its time if set when the sign was in the feet; or timber cut when the sap was down would last far longer.
Titus listened to Marissa breathing against him for some time, then asked her, “How come you ain’t got no brothers and sisters?”
She trembled slightly when he asked the question, then clutched him tightly as she answered. “I was first born. Nobody will tell me for certain, maybe they don’t know for certain—but I figure me being born hurt something inside my ma. Folks always said it was just God’s will that she and pa had no more children. But I know she missed out on a lot by not having a big family like she and pa had always planned on.”
“That’s why she’s allays talking about the grandbabies you’re gonna give her—”
“The grandbabies
Every day he found himself growing more and more comfortable with the idea of staying on there. Especially on those nights when she came to him like this and they lay together, cool flesh to cool flesh. Yet every morning after she left him to slip away in the chill, predawn air, Titus sensed his doubts of staying return, his confusion on just how to tell her resurfacing, and, oh—how to explain it to her parents?
He sensed this pull on him as if it were the tides, as if he were floundering in that swimming hole back home where he and Amy had swum as children, then made one another lovers. Floundering he was: flailing away with his arms and legs, not ever drowning, but never getting any closer to shore either. All that work and effort, only to keep his head above water … gasping, gasping for breath….
She was talking to him now about their first night together, recalling how she had come to the bottom of the ladder and called out his name in a whisper until he had poked his head over the side of the loft and looked down at her wrapped in her sleeping gown of fine white linen cambric, one bare foot on the bottom rung. How that bare foot and those little toes had made him want her right then and there. She went on to remind him how scared he had acted when she’d asked if she could climb up the ladder, the better to sit and talk with him.
“I finally talked you into it, didn’t I?” she asked. “Talked you into a lot of things. Just like I’m sure I’ll talk you into falling in love with me one day real soon.”
Then Marissa’s chatter drifted back to that first night, how she had explained to him she wished to be kissed, to be held, just like a woman. Miserable because she believed she was getting so old, when other girls her age were spoken for, some even getting married and starting their families.
“You got lots of time,” he soothed her. “Sixteen ain’t old.”
“Out here it’s old. A girl learns to lye corn and weave nettle cloth at six or seven in this country. My pa always said if he’d had him a boy, he’d learned to hunt and trap afore that boy learned to hoe and plow—at least long before he learned how to read. Why, I know of girls marrying when they was thirteen or fourteen, Titus. Even my ma said she was late in posting her banns—she had me when she was seventeen.”
Lying there, Bass winced on the seriousness of that, this custom of declaring before all that he intended to
