It had all taken less than a half-dozen heartbeats, his chest hammering like the devil as he watched the bird go. Wishing. Wishing …
He had simply stayed too long. Titus cursed himself for hanging on as long with the Guthries as he had. Was a time four years back when he had vowed to the heavens that he would never again raise blisters on his hands with farmwork. But for the sake of that warm and willing body, for the sake of that sweet ecstasy of having a woman wrapped around his manhood, for the sake of knowing he meant the world to at least one person—he had forgotten that vow.
Denied it because he had made the mistake of falling in love with Marissa Guthrie.
For sure, his young, curious, eager body may have hungered for Amy Whistler in the worst way as she’d escorted him to the brink of manhood … but his heart had been captured by Able Guthrie’s daughter. He hadn’t counted on it, no more than he had counted on running into Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat and crew and floating with them on down to New Orleans. No more than he had counted on staying on all those seasons with the skinny whore who held him tightly until it was she who was ready to leave. No, he hadn’t counted on a lot of things that had happened in these years since slipping away from Rabbit Hash and Boone County.
Still, he never would have dreamed things would turn out like this with Marissa. Him running again, that is.
Twice now in his young life Titus had been forced to make his choice. Both times fleeing what he feared most. First off his pap and that land Thaddeus kept clearing, more land for more crops every season. And now he’d fled the girl and the land. Running from family and children and sinking down roots—all that Marissa Guthrie represented.
Time and again he had convinced himself he wasn’t really in love with her. It was only the way she felt lying next to him. That and the smell of her hair, the taste of her skin. No, it couldn’t really be love that he felt for her.
Yet it was his fear that he already had fallen in love with her that drove him to leave in the first gray of a frosty dawn like some sham thief.
Five days ago he had awakened with the seeping of first light into that new barn’s loft, where he lay beneath that new cedar-shake roof, awakening to the damp chill at that coldest time of day before the sun even prepared to make its rise over the earth. He had rolled over, shivering, at first attempting to go back to sleep, to secure some warmth beneath those two thick blankets he owned. Then he’d suddenly snapped awake, poking his head out to peer into the dim, ashen light. Blinking, Titus had rubbed the grit from them, then looked again—until he’d realized the fog surrounding him was his own breath. Frost borne of the chill of that early-autumn morn as the crystalline air defined the edges of all things, sharp and crisp.
Making clear what he had to do.
Already there too long. Spring had tumbled into summer. Summer had drained into fall. That ancient toll of seasons within him had once more sounded its warning knell—announcing the time for leave-taking had come. To be on the march once more, moving north to the city that had lured Levi Gamble west. The very city Able Guthrie had warned him against.
“Maybe I can take you with me to St. Louie one time of the coming winter, Titus,” the settler had grunted as they had shouldered one of the roof beams across the wright pole. “Hap that you can see for yourself the devilment that lures a man away from his rightful place making the land fruitful.”
Day after day that spring into summer they had harnessed Abie’s oxen to the long logs they’d felled and trimmed, then snaked them through the forest toward the site where they were raising Guthrie’s barn. Using their hand axes, they had notched every corner before hoisting each log into position, using ropes and oak pulleys and the backs of those snorting oxen heaving the timbers ever higher.
Then the farmer had carefully shimmed and trimmed the corners as he’d needed to square them with the world. Not owning a carpenter’s level, Able—like most men on the frontier—had improvised with a small bottle so filled with water that one good-sized bubble remained when it was turned on its side.
“We make every log right, Titus,” Guthrie had seemed to repeat each day they’d devoted time to raising that barn. “Make every one square and level. And just like a man chooses the right tools for his job, he must choose the right wood.”
Able had gone on to explain much of what Titus’s grandpap had taught him years before concerning the building of a proper structure to keep out the cold and the beasts and the red man too. From generation down to generation such wisdom was passed on: that first tree cut should be hardwood, like maple, providing pegs for the job at hand; next came oak or cedar, some wood easily split for roof boards and doors, anything requiring rived planks—things made of seasoned wood carefully stacked and allowed to dry properly.
“But a man with a family to feed and protect might not always have him the time to wait on seasoned wood,” Able had added. “He has to get his family behind some walls.”
Each generation was taught those walls should not be of oak, for it was far too heavy when green, and even dry, tending to split with age. Beech and hickory must be avoided as well because they tended to rot beneath the onslaught of rains and snows, damps and dews. Pine too should not be used, as it decayed far too easily, fried and smelled to the eternal heavens, besides being highly flammable after seasoning.
Instead, the most solid homes on the far frontier were built of hewed cedar—when a man could have it—even the more abundant poplar, soft as it was and therefore easily worked with an adze, hewn into a rectangular instead of a square shape, which allowed a man two wall timbers from one log instead of one. Stacked on their short ends, most cabins therefore rarely required more than six timbers from doorsill to doortop.
One by one, hour by hour, a few logs a day inched the long barn walls ever higher until the final bearers of the roof timbers were in place, then wright poles notched in, secured with long iron spikes as a bed for the successive support beams. That shell of the roof was ready for the broad clapboards they eventually laid over with huge cedar shakes. Down below them in those waning days of summer Lottie and Marissa mixed water and clay, then stomped in just the right proportion of hay and daubed their recipe between every wall log to chink the barn against the coming winter.
Many were the times he had gazed down at her pigtails tied up with ribbon to pull her chestnut curls back from her mud-smeared face, finding her glancing up at him to smile before she went back to stomping more chink in that clay pit.
That dark morning of escape he had glanced below at the barn furniture they were beginning to hew out now that the roof was finished, ready to hold back the autumn rains: things like those feed boxes and water troughs, wooden latches for the stable doors, and a new shovel for mucking out manure. … He knew Able could finish the last details with his own hands. Alone.
From the dark timber came the howl of a wolf on the heels of an owl hoot.
Shuddering as much with anticipation as with the cold, Titus had pulled on his canvas britches and tucked in that shirt Marissa had sewn him out of mixed cloth. All that he possessed: few folks on the frontier had more than one change of clothing. After lashing his freshly tallowed moccasins around his ankles, he bent to collect what little else he owned, rolling an extra shirt, a small kettle and skillet, along with a handful of iron utensils and blacksmith tools Able Guthrie had helped him make at the hot and sooty work of the forge.
Maybe it had been all the talk over that last week or so that had rekindled the same old restlessness. What farmers there were clearing homes for their families out of that Missouri wilderness north of the old French settlement at Cape Girardeau had determined they should have themselves an autumn jubilee—to come together and celebrate the arrival of another harvest season come and gone with the bounty of the land spread across their tables, as well as an excuse to bring out a little spruce beer or cherry flip or homemade brandy. Autumn was, after all, cause for celebration.
The women had fluttered around the long line of tables strung end to end through the center of the neighbor’s yard, setting every dish and pot and kettle just so while the young children needed no formal introductions and got right down to playing blindman’s buff and hide-and-seek. Titus had come there with the Guthries, finding how contented it made him to watch Marissa among the women-folk, seeing her eyes find his from time to time while he stayed with the men, old and young alike. They loaded their pipes, drank from their great clay mugs, and told their bawdy stories when there were no women about nor children playing among their legs. Stories of St. Louie. Unbelievable tales of the rouged and willing women that beckoned all passersby to come use their manhood on them, promising wild and devilish delights. Titus knew such places were not the stuff of myth and fable. He had seen Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the Swamp with his own eyes.
