been bested. Serious enough business that the contest had long had three divisions: one contest held between all those men who were clearly long in the tooth yet still possessed a clear eye and a steady hand; another match that allowed the county’s youth to pit their skills one against the other; and the final competition—the annual fair’s most-watched event—pitting young men from sixteen and up from all the farms and towns to compete for the right to be known as Boone County’s best marksman.
For the last three summers Titus had carried home his prizes from the fair, taking first place against the county’s other youth each August. For the last two years how he had looked forward to this seventeenth summer: eligible to match his skill against the finest marksmen he had watched shoot ever since he was a wee lad big enough to load his own rifle.
In the last few months Thaddeus Bass had been preaching to his son, “It makes little shake what those men do toeing that line and firing their muskets at a distant mark. No, Titus—in life what matters only is what a man does to provide for those who count on him.”
More than just about anything, Titus wanted to change his father’s tune—to have his pap pound him on the back gleefully once he won the shooting contest and say that, yes, there was something worthwhile in being the best, after all, something worthwhile in his son having a dream different from his own. He knew he could never be what his father wanted him to be, for he realized he was not stamped to walk the same path his pap had taken. So it was that this year Titus carried great hope in his heart that once he proved himself not only capable, but the best, his father would finally relent and remove the tight harness he had buckled around his eldest son.
“Titus?”
He pushed back the floppy brim and gazed up at the sound of her voice. The summer’s light lit the copper strands in her dusty hair with tongues of flame. How he stirred to see her, gratified she had come to find him.
“Amy. I looked for you this morning down at the shooting line.”
With a shrug she replied, “Helping mama with her baking. Lunch is done and the other’ns’re all fed, so she said I could come look you up for a bit. Leastwise till it’s time to go help her put supper together. The young’uns is going crazy—running here and there.”
He shifted himself up against the tree and pulled the hat off his head, pushing back a thick shock of dark, damp hair out of his eyes. “I … I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Something been … what I been meaning to ask for last couple weeks.”
“Yes?” she prodded, settling near his knee, her legs folded to the side in that way of hers that hid her bare feet and ankles beneath her faded dress, one of her mother’s best.
“You …,” he started, then cleared his throat as his eyes retreated from her face and he went to scratching at the old hound’s ear. For some time now he’d been brooding on just how to get this said—choosing his words carefully from what he realized was a most limited vocabulary of a young man totally ignorant of such mysteries in life. “I figure a girl knows about such things. ’Specially you since’t you was around when all your brothers and sisters was borned, and it seems only natural that a girl pays proper attention to such things.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between his. “What you wanna ask me, Titus?”
Again he looked into those green eyes. “T-tell me how a woman knows she’s gonna have a baby.”
Her cheeks flushed with a tint of pale strawberry, and her eyes dropped a moment. Amy yanked up a tall blade of grass and brought it to her lips. Sucking on the green shoot, she finally said, “If a woman ain’t with child, once a moon she gets a visit of a particular ailment, Titus.”
“Ailment? Like’n you got the ague?”
“Not ’sactly. She don’t feel so good. Her belly gives her fits, cramping up—like that.”
He shook his head, still bewildered. “So?”
“So if she’s gonna have a baby—like you said—those visits once a moon don’t come to trouble her.”
Still he was having trouble making the connection, unable to fathom what it all meant as he sat there in the shady, sticky heat of that August afternoon. Nonetheless, he leaned toward her, undeterred from his quest. “You saying if she don’t have that visit for two or three months, that woman knows she carrying a child?”
“That, and my mama was always sick for the first few months she was about to have another young’un.”
“Sick?”
“Like”—and she rubbed her belly—“the heaves and all that.”
He nodded. “Oh.”
“Why you wanna know about that, Titus?”
Looking away now that she had asked a question, his eyes crawled to the canopy of long weeping-willow branches swaying on the hot breeze. “You … Amy—have you got your visit … since we—since we … there at the swimming hole. Have you?”
“Is that what you’re asking about?” she replied, wideeyed and gaping in surprise. “Y’ was thinking I’m carrying your baby?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I need to know.”
“I ain’t had my visit since we was at the swimming hole, Titus. I’m telling you, jus’ so you’ll know.”
He swallowed hard. There it was—as unexpected and bad a piece of news as any could have been. And he suddenly felt a little hotter, a little more suffocated by the damp heat.
“Then you might’n be carrying m-my baby?”
Placing a hand gently over her abdomen, she said, “If’n it’s a baby, it’s your baby, Titus.”
He wagged his head, feeling dizzied by the announcement. “My baby.”
Amy patted the back of his hand, then held it in hers. “Mama says a woman don’t necessarily get herself with child every time she’s with a man. Don’t always happen.”
“Just when you don’t get your visit each moon.”
“Right,” she answered. “Things gotta be right, I guess, atween a man and a woman for a baby to grow in the woman’s belly.”
He was confused again. “Things gotta be right?”
With a shrug Amy replied, “I s’pose my mama meant that the man and woman loved the other, they was married. Maybeso like us, they gonna get married.”
“G-gonna get married,” he repeated with a mumble.
“If … if I was carrying your baby, I’d be right happy, Titus.”
“Happy?”
“We could have a head start on our life together that way—getting our family going early on.”
“Family.”
Just the sound of it rang with such finality.
But he had climbed atop her for only a few seconds, for what seemed like the blink of an eye, one thump of his leaping heart—and for that fleeting moment he might now have a baby to feed and clothe and care for until it was growed up enough to go out on its own. Like he damn well was this very summer.
Beyond a row of chestnut trees a bell rang out, tolling six gongs.
He sat up straighter, listening and counting each toll of the nearby bell. “I’ll have to go in a half hour.”
“Why?”
“They was calling the fellas for the final relay.”
“The championship?”
“Yes,” he replied, taking the longrifle into his hands and laying it across his lap. The old hound stirred. Tink looked at Titus beneath a drooping eyelid, then rolled over and went back to sleep. “Time come soon for me to show ’em all what I’m made of.”
“I already know what you’re made of. Gonna be so proud of you, Titus,” Amy declared with a smile. “You doing this for the both of us.” Then she glanced down at her belly. “Maybe even the three of us.”
“Three?” His throat seized, feeling more constricted at that moment than when he had tasted the corn mash a friend of his pap’s had brewed up for this year’s fair.
“Could be,” she answered. “You know how it is when a man and a woman love each other and wanna be husband and wife. It’s how we was at the swimming hole a couple weeks back.”
“I … I—”
She prodded him coyly, “You remember, don’t you?”
