“Ain’t never gonna forget.”
He pulled a gay red bandanna from a front pocket of his britches and swiped it across his forehead, glad it was so hot that she wouldn’t ever tell how it made him sweat just talking about this with her.
“In a way,” Amy said, her voice softer now, those big doe eyes of hers darting left and right before she leaned forward confidentially, “I’ve been thinking on how good that made me feel—how I’d like to feel that good again sometime soon.”
“S-soon?”
“Maybe real soon,” Amy answered, leaning back and bringing her legs under her to rise. “Maybeso tonight: you come look me up over to my folks’ tent after supper chores is done.”
“Tonight. Yes.”
He rose unsteadily beside her, his temples pounding, hoping it was just the heat that made his head swim on rising waves of pressure. Then she was pressed against him, rubbing a breast against his arm. He looked down at the contours of her straining beneath the thin fabric of her dress.
“You want to touch ’em again, don’t you, Titus?”
“I, I surely would.”
Planting a kiss lightly on the singed redness of his hairless cheek, Amy giggled and turned away. Over her shoulder she said, “Look me up, Titus—an’ we’ll sneak off so you can do all the touching you want.”
Godamighty!
He watched her sway side to side, moving off through the grass and sunlight toward the bustle and din of the fair, her long skirt sweeping this way then that as she threw those rounded hips of hers about. It made his mouth go dry just remembering how those hips felt in his hands, how he hadn’t just held them, more even than a frantic grope, but had clawed at them as he attempted to drive himself into her there in the cool black water of that stream.
Into … inside … he never had been inside her, if there was an inside to women. Maybe there wasn’t and everything was all outside, like he was. And a man was just s’posed to get his pecker laid down atween their legs, getting hisself pointed just right afore he shot. And that was what made babies grow: was when a man shot center—the way he was determined to shoot center this evening—and his juices landed in just the right place on a woman’s privates.
And then he felt some self-imposed embarrassment, just in thinking about it. There was no one he could ask. Nary a friend from the Rabbit Hash school he dared mention his fears to. Sure was he that they were as ignorant of such primal matters as he was. No father he could present himself to and ask for answers to such vital questions. Maybe only Amy herself held the key.
He’d have to learn the mysteries from her—if he dared.
Dared … because he was scared, frightened right down to the soles of his feet that he had put her with child already. Lying down atop a gal and pointing his pecker in the right direction, then shooting center to make a real mess on her, to make a mess of their lives.
It was one bit of marksmanship Titus wasn’t all that sure he was so proud of right now as he leaned over and nuzzled the redbone hound.
“C’mon, you
Tink whimpered a bit, mostly howled as he leaped against the length of rope tied around his neck when Titus left him behind, secured to a tree beside his folks’ pair of poor lean-tos.
Thaddeus had pitched their camp right beside a Cincinnati pot merchant who was selling his kettles and ovens beneath an awning of bright-blue Russian sheeting. In cherrywood boxes he also displayed the medicinais he had to sell, English ague and fever drops, as well as butter tubs and cream jugs made of fired and painted clays. On the other side of them sat the red-trimmed marquee tent of a glassman from Pittsburgh. Here in the first decade of the nineteenth century glass was relatively plentiful, not yet overly priced for those settlers pushing against the western frontier. Forty of the twelve-by-twelve-inch panes sold for fourteen shillings, little more than a nickel apiece.
Titus had to force himself to turn his back on the disappointed dog and walk away hurriedly, as sorry as he felt leaving Tink behind at camp. But trouble it would be with the dog at the shooting line, the noise and the press of people. The match would be tough enough for him to concentrate on without Tink lolling there between his legs the way he’d done that morning during the qualifying relays.
“Titus!”
He turned.
“You didn’t even gimme a kiss good-bye,” Betsey Bass scolded her son as she stopped before him.
“Ain’t good-bye, Mam.”
She brushed her fingers along his cheek. “You’re away to the big match, ain’tcha?”
Titus nodded. “Where’s pap?”
She shrugged, saying, “Don’t know. Went off with some others to go talk seeds, they was when I last saw ’em.” And she leaned up on the toes of her worn, scuffed boots to kiss his cheek. “That’s for luck, Titus. You go show ’em.”
“I will, Mam. You gonna come, ain’tcha?”
“Course, son. I’ll be there shortly.”
“An’ pap? He coming to watch me win?”
His mother’s lips quivered in deliberation before she answered. “I’m sure he’ll be looking in on the match, Titus. Now, you go show ’em your best.”
He set off again toward the shooting range on the far side of the meadow, where they fired into the side of a tall, wooded hill. He hoped his father would show, knowing the odds were against it. Touching his cheek where his mother had planted her lips, it made him wonder—when a man got old enough to be having girls kissing on him, was he too old for his mam to kiss on him then?
He was sure it sounded right—that there came a time when mothers should damn well stop embarrassing their sons by kissing them like they were children—then thought on fathers and their children. He struggled to recall any embrace from his pap, trying desperately to remember if he had seen his father hug his other three children. A kiss from Thaddeus—why, that was purely out of the question! A man, leastways the men Titus knew of, they never would be caught kissing. Not a woman, and surely not one of their children.
The sun had settled so that the bottom of its orb rested on the tops of the far trees back of the range. It would be warm on his neck. Already a crowd had gathered, knots of spectators sprinkled here and there, most all of them settled on the grass in the shade of trees and brush, a few standing. Some of those were women who sported new bonnets of the brightest calicoes and ginghams. Perhaps an arm wrapped around a husband or a sweetheart who wore his finest drop-shoulder shirt. As Titus stepped into line at the judges’ table, he looked down at his own faded hickory shirt, spun and woven from the Basses’ own flax and wool by his mother, then dyed a light brown with the natural dye of walnut shells she saved for just such a purpose. Folks on this frontier rarely called such cloth linsey-woolsey. Instead, what they wove to clothe their family they called mixed cloth.
Maybeso with his prize money he would have enough to buy himself a new shirt for this coming year’s schooling, his last. Mayhaps enough even to buy his mam something pretty. And a special gift for Amy.
“You’re the Bass boy, ain’t you?”
He nodded to the man seated in a straight-backed, cane-bottomed chair behind the table where sat several inkwells and packets of ink powder amid large sheets of lined foolscap where names and numbers had been inscribed. “Yes, sir.”
“Titus?”
“Yes.”
The man nodded to his assistant, who hoisted a burlap bag across the table with the clatter of wood and said, “Like I’m telling every one of you last ten fellers, we’ll start off at twelve rods. Each shooter will have one chance’t at his target. If he don’t hit it—he’s out, and the rest go on to the next targets set up two rods farther on. In this-a-way, we keep going till there’s only one feller.”
“And he’s the champeen.”
The man smiled. “That’s right. Like you been last couple years to the junior side of the shooting.”
“What’s in the bag?”
