sensed that same tightening across his lower belly and drew back, confused at this all-compelling need to concentrate not on her mouth, but to get himself between her legs.
As he rose on his hands, he looked down at the soft, rounded mounds of her breasts, the skin pale against the darker pink of her nipples. Then attempted to thrust himself farther against her.
“Not, not like …,” she said huskily.
And in the next moment Amy had seized his hard flesh and was guiding it against a softer spot, lower between her smooth thighs. Making the end of him brush the folds of flesh as the sky seemed to light up all around him with shooting stars, the earth quaked beneath him, as if to swallow them up.
He felt that first explosion—no doubt of that—yet it was the second and all those that rocked him afterward that seized Titus with such force he knew he would likely never see again. Everything had turned black except for the shooting stars. Again and again his hips flung forward against her, his hot flesh still enclosed in her hand, trying desperately to bury his rigid penis in her without success as he spent himself in great waves against the inside of her thigh.
She sighed as he trembled to a halt, and laid his head in the curve where her neck met a shoulder.
“We’ll have lots of babies,” she whispered, clutching his head to her chin, the other hand still gripping his softening flesh. “I’ll give you lots of children, Titus. I’ll raise them, and you raise the crops. Man and woman supposed to be like that.”
He shuddered again, this time from fear. Of a sudden afraid at what he had just done. This talk of babies and joining Amy on the land. Knowing he was not the sort who could sink the rest of his life into the ground with her.
Afraid he would never be man enough to stay.
3
Titus slapped at a big blue-black fly droning in the hot, sticky air right in front of his nose. Noisy enough with all the clatter and racket, all the people moving past, with beeves mooing, pigs grunting, and sheep baaing. Yet none of it bothered him—except for the incessant, bothersome drone of that fly.
Then he had it, snapping his hand around the pesky insect in a blur. When he opened his palm, there it lay, stunned, wings flitting lamely, buzzing inconstantly. Without remorse he slapped the palm against the side of his old britches, swiped off the hand on the pants, then closed his eyes again after tugging down the old floppy-brimmed wool-felt hat.
It wasn’t cool here, even tucked back in the shade. But at least beneath this weeping willow he found it was a damned sight less hot than out there in the late-summer sun where the afternoon dragged on and on. He had a little time to rest before the next relay of shooters was due on the firing line at three. Right square in the hottest part of the day. The ten competitors who qualified from these last five relays would all compete come early evening after the sun began to sink and the air might cool to something bearable.
As for Titus, it had proved to be a long day already.
Last night he hadn’t been able to sleep all that well—not that sleeping rolled up in his blankets on the ground had ever bothered him. No, it was more that his excitement, anticipation, eagerness to be about this contest kept him tossing until he finally drifted off sometime shortly before the sun made its appearance that Saturday in mid- August.
“These dog days,” is what his mother muttered repeatedly, no matter was she at home or here at the fair.
Dog days came once a year, visited upon northern Kentucky with summer’s last vengeful fare-thee-well. Here after the crops were all in the fields, growing to beat the band, and just before that slick-eyed schoolmaster would again ring his bell signaling that first day of school for the new year, eager to get in a few weeks of book learning before classes would be suspended while the young boys stayed to home, helping out in the fields during the harvest time. Only when the crops had been gathered and all was securely put up would the farmers think of sending their children back to school.
Dog days. Beside him lay the old redbone, his hunting partner of the last handful of years. Tongue lolling, eyes glazed in fatigued stupor, the hound lay on his back upon the patch of shady grass, his belly exposed. Gnats swarmed in clouds around his watery eyes. The dog snorted at them, dragged a paw down his long muzzle in frustration, then rolled onto his side to plop a leg over his nose.
Nearby the rhythmic booming continued nonstop from the long firing line staked out at the edge of the meadow. Interposed between each rumble of the muzzle loaders he heard the squeals of children at play, the giggles of the young girls eyeing the summer’s crop of prospective beaux, and the laughter of adults passing this way and that among the meandering knots of marquees and wall tents, canvas awnings, and fire-smudged lean-tos stretched across a modest framework of poles. From every one a barker gave nearly the same call—something to entice passersby into viewing their wares: baked goods, fruits and vegetables, needlework, woolens, leather goods, harness and plowshares, woodwork, ironmongery, all of it for sale at this once-a-year carnival begun long ago.
The Boone County Longhunters Fair—a celebration of the county’s own namesake and his blazing of a trail into this land of the canebrakes—was held on this same ground this time every year to insure the greatest turnout, and therefore sales, for each of the merchants who traveled here from as far away as Pittsburgh and as nearby as Cincinnati. Besides, a person had the opportunity to browse past the displays of fine mercantile goods spread out atop crates and display tables by the local merchants of Rabbit Hash, Belleview, and Petersburg, and even this sprawling village of Burlington as well, not to mention what many of the poorer families set out atop worn blankets spread upon the ground before their lean-tos, hoping to sell their modest, homemade crafts.
This carnival of baking, quilting, and other contests each summer brought a growing throng here to Burlington for the better part of three or four days. Families arrived on the fairgrounds to select a spot down by one of the two creeks, perhaps choosing something back against the woods, and there raised their tents and dug their fire pits. Friends greeted friends they had not seen for an entire year. Men hailed one another and spoke of their crops, their hogs and sheep. Women shared recipes and spoke of loved ones gone to their reward with the past winter. Children frolicked and dogs scampered with abandon through the meadow until fair officials came through, as they always did, ordering all animals tied up in camp.
That’s why Tink had a short length of rope loosely knotted around his neck, the end of the loop stuffed into Titus’s belt. Just so the old hound wouldn’t get himself into trouble, maybe even shot by some man whose wife screamed out that a dog had just run off with their supper, plucked right from the fireside. Such a thing had happened at noon, and the squire of Burlington, along with his duly elected town constable, had to pull that dead dog’s owner off the dog killer for the sake of not charting up more of a human toll than the town fathers counted on every year.
For certain, there was plenty of celebration flowing free enough. The wines and brandies and beers brewed every year for just this festival were most often consumed in moderate quantities. Just enough to enliven each festive night’s music and dancing. Still, there were always a few of the young wags who could not hold their liquor and ended up taking offense at some snub, those who got nasty and often pulled up a chunk of firewood, if not a knife, to settle whatever wrong they believed done them. Most times others merely pulled the quarrelers off to opposite sides of the sprawling camping grounds, where they could cool down and eventually sleep off their revelry. Rarely was the constable called in to hustle someone off to his modest jail.
But this shooting of a man’s hunting dog was considered by many serious enough an offense to warrant the owner shooting the dog killer. Both had been dragged away to jail minutes ago, there to languish for the rest of the fair, one offender in each of the constable’s two cells, where they could glare at one another, curse a blue streak if they chose, and likely try their marksmanship spitting at one another between a set of crude iron bars.
After that pair of scrappers had been dragged off in irons, the fair quickly resumed its atmosphere of merriment and music, a celebration of rural frontier life at its best. Back on the shooting range, the judges returned to their task of determining who was to be known as the best shot in Boone County.
It was serious, this shooting contest held each summer. Merchants in nearby Burlington put up the finest in the way of a purse for the winner, with a few prizes donated for second, third, and fourth places—those who had
