babe and all those babes to come. Saying how he would take his place beside his father and all would then be right in their lives.
But Titus Bass heard very, very little of her words.
The night was simply too crowded with the crushing silence of his need to be gone before he became everything his father was.
He cursed his ignorance as much as he cursed this farming, even as much as he cursed the father who imprisoned him to the land.
But right now it was his ignorance of women and how nature made babies that made him feel as if he were locked inside a tiny wooden box, suffocated and cramped, hollering to get out.
“Mama told me I’d miss out on them visits of the terribles each month,” Amy had explained in recent weeks most times she talked of the expected child. “Woman with a baby coming wouldn’t have no bleeding each month neither.”
“Bleeding?” he asked. She hadn’t told him anything about that.
“Sure,” she explained in that matter-of-fact voice she saved only for the times she wanted to flaunt her two- year head start on life over him. “That’s how a woman knows for certain she ain’t carrying her man’s baby—she starts bleeding when her monthly visit time comes.”
“W-what sort of bleeding?” His mind was instantly busy on his remembrance of her naked moonlit body stretched out on the grass beside the swimming hole. Where in the devil would she bleed? And the image in his mind became that of a game animal, sprawled out on the forest floor as he dressed out squirrels and rabbits, turkeys or deer, before setting off for home with the family’s dinner.
Her eyes dropped as she laid a hand softly on her belly. “You know, don’t you?” When he shook his head, Amy explained, “From down … there. Where a man puts his seed. Like you done, Titus.”
“My seed?”
“That’s what mama calls it. The seed what a man gives a woman so she can carry his baby inside her till it’s time for it to be born.”
He nodded, swallowing hard, remembering how he had exploded across the soft flesh on the inside of her thighs. Thick and sticky. Seeds that landed on a woman’s fertile ground and were thereby made into a child by some mysterious force of nature. The way he and his father prepared the ground for planting, then walked slowly across that ground they had turned, fresh and fertile, warm and upturned, dropping their seed into the folds of the earth like the folds of a fertile woman. Sun and rain did the rest.
God must surely have made a woman like the land. And a man was always the farmer, sowing his seed.
Farmers!
Damn! he cursed himself in silence. Now more than ever he wanted to flee as far away from farming as he could go.
“I been counting, Titus,” Amy went on, slowly rubbing her bare feet back and forth on the cool grass beneath that maple at the far end of the pen that held the Bass family’s milk cow. “It’ll still be winter when I have the baby. Likely you’ll be finishing up school sometime after spring planting.”
He sensed his last shreds of hope tumbling out of his life the way crumpled clumps of earth spilled between his father’s fingers just after newly plowing a piece of ground. More so like long coils of purple gut spilling out of the belly of a deer he had dropped….
“—know my folks let us have the wedding right there in the yard,” Amy was explaining. “Let all our kin and friends know, even up to Burlington, over to Union and down to Beaver Lick. I’m sure there’ll be some real celebrating for us—what with as long as our families been settled here in Boone County.”
Squeezing his eyes, Titus could not help but imagine that sight: he and Amy standing before one of those circuit riders or civil justices speaking marriage words to them out of the Holy Book.
“—then all there is after that is deciding on where we’re gonna live till you and your pa get to raising up our own place for us to live in.”
“Where?”
Amy looked at him hard, her gaze showing she realized he had not been paying her the heed due her as the mother of his child. “Yes, Titus. Either here with your folks, or over to mine. We’ll have to thrash that one out atween us all.”
“I don’t know about living here—”
“No matter. We’ll make room for ourselves, wherever we are,” she said with that air of confidence exuded only by one who is nearly shed of her teens. “Just you think about finishing your education, Titus Bass. Our children gonna be counting on their father. So you think about getting this last year of school learning under your belt so you can put your mind to helping your pa with the family farming.” She extended her arm in a slow arc across the yard, cabin, barn, and outbuildings. “One day this all be yours … ours. But first you finish up your schooling.”
He looked up to find his father coming across the yard toward them, walking as if with a real purpose. That soured his milk all the worse—already Titus was in no mood to have someone yanking on his rope, Amy or his pap. Here a woman was wrapping him tighter and tighter, not to mention that his father kept him fenced in, no different than if he was that milk cow held prisoner in her tiny pen. It rankled him, the way Amy had taken to preaching at him. The same as his father did: about responsibility and family and the land, and responsibility all over again.
“How do, Amy,” Thaddeus Bass called out as he came to a halt.
“Mr. Bass. Nice to see you, sir.”
“Titus,” he said, turning to his son, “I come to tell you not to be out too late tonight. I want you back in the fields tomorrow.”
He looked at Amy quickly. “Tomorrow?”
“I want you to finish up that stump work afore you go back for any more of that school business.”
For a heartbeat he felt elation that his father was giving his permission to stay off from school. But that elation burst just like a bubble in his mother’s lye soap when he realized the substitute would be farmwork.
“That’s a lotta work,” Titus grumped.
“Not if you get after it the way I know you can. I need that field cleared so I can turn the ground afore winter. Lay it fallow to catch as much rain and snow as the sky will give us this winter. Planning on planting over there come spring—so I need to have that ground turned afore winter.”
He sighed, his head sagging between his shoulders, feeling his father’s eyes on him, waiting for an answer, judging.
“You can forget your hunting till the work’s done, Titus,” Thaddeus declared impatiently. “I put your grandpap’s rifle in the corner by the fireplace, and there it’s gonna stay till the stumps is all pulled.”
He jerked up at the admonition, as if his father had pulled on a halter rope attached to a bit shoved inside his mouth. “That’s
“I know. But you’re still my son, living under my roof—and there’s chores to be done afore you go slipping off with any more of that hunting foolishness in mind. This is a farm. And this is a farming family, Titus. That comes first. You best remember that.”
Wagging his head in disbelief, Titus groaned. “I come this close to winning myself some real money with that rifle. That ain’t no foolishness.”
“You come in second and you’re right: that’s nothing no man can be ’shamed of, son,” Thaddeus replied sternly, his hands braced on his hips.
“Never gonna be ’shamed of nothin’,” he said, his jaw jutting angrily.
“But even so that you beat all the rest but one fella—it’s time you realized you was home now. Time you got back to what is really important: raising crops to feed this family.”
“Didn’t ever tell you I couldn’t hunt and help out ’round here,” Titus snapped.
“Well, it’s about time you was forgetting you ever tried to do both,” Thaddeus Bass snapped. “That rifle stays in the corner till your farming is done to my satisfaction.”
Titus glanced over at Amy, seeing by the look on her face that she clearly agreed with the elder Bass. He turned back to glare at his father. “You wanna kill something in me, don’t you?” he snarled, seeing his words bring his father up short.
Then Thaddeus Bass glowered, his lips working for a moment on just what to say, what to do with Amy right there. “Long as you’re under my roof, Titus—you’ll do as I say you’re to do. Best you remember that, and remember
