For some time he gazed into her eyes, looked at the fullness of her lips, wanting to lie with her again the way they had times before. So much did he want that. Almost enough to change his mind and tell her everything that she wanted to hear. Maybe he was stupid, after all, just like his pap and some other grown-ups made him feel most nearly all the time.
“I thought some on this, Amy,” he began. “I figure I can support a wife wherever I go.”
“Wherever you go?” she asked with a shriek. “W-what’s that mean?”
“Means I’m figuring I won’t stay around Boone County for long.”
Shaking her head emphatically, Amy replied, “No. I ain’t going nowhere else, Titus Bass. This is where I was born, where I’m going to birth my own children and raise them up. Here’s where I’m staying till I die. Ain’t you gonna stay on this land with me?”
A great gray owl flapped over their heads as Mrs. Whistler stepped onto the porch and sang out for the younger children to come in for the night. Then she called, “Amy?”
“I’m over here, Mama.”
“You two don’t be long,” the woman said, hustling little ones through the cabin door. “Night’s getting cold, and Titus has his school in the morning.”
Once her brothers and sisters were shuffled inside the cabin, Amy turned to him, beginning to push away so she could get to her feet. “You got school in the morning. I best be going in too.”
He sensed a sudden chill around her, more than the autumn twilight lent a frost to the air. “If I take a mind to do something else, ain’t going to school tomorrow.”
“What else can be more important than your schooling?”
“Hunting. Watching the boats down on the river. Wondering where all them folks is going. What they’ll be doing down the Ohio to Louisville and on yonder. There’s places futher still. Lot futher.”
She stomped a foot in the cold grass. “All that talk from Levi Gamble got your head filled with having yourself adventures, don’t it?”
“Maybeso it does.”
Pulling herself away from him, Amy whirled about, crossing her arms. “Then maybe you better figure out what it is you want more: me or some old adventure downriver.”
Looking up at her, Titus asked, “Why you make me have to choose?”
“Can’t have both,” she answered coyly, smoothing the bodice of her dress beneath the firm mounds of her breasts. “You want me, you’re gonna finish your schooling and get yourself a way to support a family. My pa and yours see to their families by working the land. Such as they do is good and honorable work, Titus. Work any man be proud of.”
“If’n he was cut out to be a farmer.”
“You was cut out to be a farmer,” she snapped. “You was born to a farming family. It’s what all your kin done since they come into this country years and years ago.”
“Don’t matter what they done afore me—”
“It’s what you’re expected to do,” she interrupted.
As he stood beside her, Titus felt enough resolve to declare, “I ain’t cut out to work the land.”
Her words took on more frost. “You’re making a great mistake: you don’t want to marry and settle down with me.”
“You’re telling me I gotta pay too big a price, Amy. I can’t be a farmer. Don’t see no sense in schooling neither.”
“You’ll never amount to much, then, you go off on your own now,” she said haughtily. “Never be as good a man as your pa—make the mark on life that he’s making, Titus.”
When he reached for her hand, Amy pulled away from him. Instead, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and said, “There’s more for a man to learn than reading and writing letters, working numbers, Amy. What I want to learn is waiting for me out there.”
“Oh, damn that Levi Gamble!” she grumbled. “Damn that devil for making you—”
“Don’t blame Levi,” he protested. “I knowed I wasn’t no farmer long afore I run onto Levi at the Longhunters Fair.”
“He went and filled your head with such poppy-cock—”
“I told you,” he interrupted her with a snap. “I decided long ago I was one day gonna be leaving all this life behind.”
“Leaving?”
“There’s a bigger world out there than what is right here in Boone County. I aim to see me a share of it afore my dying day, Amy.”
Her eyes narrowed as she asked, “And if that means losing me?”
“Sounds of things, you’ll be better off without me.”
She turned on her heel again, staying in that same spot. He could see her shoulder shudder in the mercuric light of the autumn moon rising out of the east. He even thought he heard a muffled sob from her. Titus reached out to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him off.
“I aim to learn more out there than what I can learn in school, Amy.”
“All you’ll ever need to know is right here—living your life with me, Titus.”
“I’ll learn more out there than I could ever learn following the rump end of a god-blamed mule.”
Her face tightened as she turned from him again. “Sounds like you made up your mind, all for certain.”
For a few moments he looked at her back, that dark spill of her hair tumbling nearly to her waist. He wanted to touch her, knowing she had only to hear the words she needed to hear and they would lie flesh to flesh. As much as he wanted to reach across that few inches remaining between them at that moment—it might just as well have been a chasm. Something kept him from retreating, from giving in to what his body begged for.
“This ain’t easy,” he confessed. “Not just you I’m leaving behind. Thinking about my mam and pap too.”
“You think hard on them. Think about me tonight—how we been together. Then you come tell me for sure you’re going.”
“I don’t have nothing to decide, Amy. I’m going. Only thing left to figure out is when.”
She twisted round on him, her red eyes brimming, fury written on her face tracked with its first tears. “I’ll make some man a damn fine wife, Titus Bass. That’s for certain. Just as certain is the fact you’re never gonna make a husband for no woman.”
“Likely I never will, Amy,” he admitted, watching the look of surprise come to her face.
“That’s right,” he continued. “Seems what a woman wants is more’n I think I’ll ever be likely to give. If being a husband to you means staying here to work behind a mule, being a farmer like your pa and mine—then, no: I’ll never be husband to no woman. If it means I gotta feel yoked in like an ox to what my pap ’spects of me, no—I won’t ever be settling down with a woman and making a family for myself.”
He said the last few words to her back as she dashed across the dusty yard while night came down around him.
“I want you to do some reading for me,” Thaddeus Bass said to his firstborn son as he rose from the table.
“Reading?” Titus asked, confusion raising alarm within him. Why would his father want him to read…? “Can’t it wait?”
“Wait? Wait for what, son?”
Titus shrugged. “I was looking to sit outside till it got cold after sundown, then I’d come in.”
He watched his father go to the stone mantel and take from it a piece of foolscap twice folded.
Shaking the paper out before him, Thaddeus said, “You ain’t going much of anywhere for a long time, Titus.”
His eyes kept flicking from the foolscap to his father’s face, back and forth, eager to figure out the suddenness of his father’s turn on him. Titus quickly glanced at his mother, his face filled with appeal. But she turned away, busying herself at the washbasin over the trenchers and utensils the family had just used at dinner. His eyes climbed toward the roof, finding above him in the shadows those three faces peering down from the edge of the sleeping loft, all of them watching the tense scene below. As soon as his father began speaking, Titus’s gaze locked on Thaddeus’s face.
