owns up to his responsibility. Owns up to his mistakes and goes on. You ain’t no man, Titus!”
“I ain’t a boy no longer.”
“You’re my boy, and you’re gonna do as I tell you long as you’re under this roof, eating my food!”
“Don’t make you right!”
Slowly, he started moving across the cabin toward his son, his words ominously calm. “I’m your father—and that’s enough for you to show your respect for me.”
“Thaddeus—oh, dear God, don’t!”
“Just gonna teach the boy a little respect for his father, woman.”
“You can’t teach me that,” Titus argued, setting his feet for what he feared was coming his way. “You gotta earn it.”
“Then—by God—I’ll beat some respect out of you!” Thaddeus roared. “Telling your old man he’s wasting his life working the land? Just who the hell you think you are?”
He shuffled his feet, readying himself. “Don’t come any closer, Pap!”
“Tell me not to come—”
“I said don’t come any closer!” Titus snapped, beginning to bring his arms up, hands clenched. “I ain’t no boy no longer … and I ain’t gonna take no more of your whuppin’s!”
Thaddeus stopped short, drew back, then snorted, “Just what the hell you think you’re gonna do if’n I take a mind to give you the whippin’ you’re deserving right about now?”
“You ain’t gonna ever lay a hand on me again.”
His father brought both his hands up, fingers spread in claws of rage. “What in hell’s name—”
“Thaddeus!” she cried.
“Don’t ever you raise your hands to me no more,” Titus warned. “You go to lay a hand on me—I’ll lay you right out.”
That brought Thaddeus up short. “You’ll do what?”
“Don’t make me, Pap. Please don’t make me. Not in front of my mam. Not in front of her.”
“Oh, God—please don’t, Thaddeus,” his mother whimpered, twisting that piece of muslin in her hands.
“You’ll lay me out, will you?” his father asked, his voice gone thoughtful, eyes gone to slits.
Titus watched his father’s face, saw something register in those eyes as Thaddeus looked him down, then up again. It was only then that Titus realized he stood nearly as tall as his father, shy no more than an inch of his father’s height. Though Thaddeus carried more muscle upon his frame, that which came of wrestling animals and harness and pitting himself against the land, although Titus might well be as thin as a split cedar-fence rail, he was nonetheless every bit as tough in his own sinewy way: as solid as second-growth hickory.
And in that moment of indecision he knew his father realized the same thing for the first time. That pause he had caused Thaddeus served to give Titus a glimmer of confidence that he would not have to grapple with the man, here below the wide, muling eyes of his brothers and that troublesome sister. Here before the fright-filled eyes of his mother.
“You heard me before, Titus,” Thaddeus finally said, his shoulders sagging as he retreated to the fireplace. “Your rifle stays in the corner. In the morning you go to school or stay to work with me. There’ll be no hunting till spring when planting time is done.”
“Till s-spring?” he said, swallowing it like gall.
“And you can’t see Amy for a month,” the man continued, his back to his son, placing both hands out wide on the top of the stone mantel, his head sagging between his shoulders as he stared down at the fire at his feet. There was resignation, if not outright defeat, in the way he held himself. “Maybe it’ll take a month. Maybe it’ll take all winter and into the spring … but maybe by then you’ll have some respect for your father and the work what’s fed you, the work what’s put the clothes on your back for sixteen summers.”
“I can’t hunt till spring?”
Without turning his father repeated his stricture. “Not till you learn to respect your father, Titus. Damn, but you hurt me when you said I been wasting my life being a farmer. Damn you for that.”
He looked at his mother. She shook her head in warning, put a finger to her lips.
“Go on now, Titus,” Thaddeus instructed. “I turn around, I don’t wanna see you down here. Time you went to bed. Morning’s coming soon, and you’ll either go to school, or be up afore then to help me on that new ground I want to plant come spring.”
For a moment he didn’t move, despite his father’s directive. It was so quiet, Titus could hear the stuffy-nosed breathing of one of the children in the loft, the crackle of the hardwood in the fireplace.
“You hear me, son? Get on up there to bed like I told you.”
He wanted to bolt away, out the door and into the night with the tears of rage he refused to let fall. Instead he swallowed them down, turning again to look at his mother. She nodded her head and gestured toward the ladder. Titus started that way.
“You plan on staying away from school, that’s all right with me, Titus,” his father said, his back still to his son. “I can use the help around our farm. But if’n you ain’t up in time to help me, I ’spect you to be off to school with your brothers and sister. Go on now and get to bed.”
Titus shuddered as he crossed the few steps it took to reach the foot of the beechwood ladder that climbed to the sleeping loft. As he took hold of a rung, Titus was suddenly compelled to turn back and recross his steps, wanting to embrace his mother, to somehow reassure her that all would turn out right. She stood with that twisted scrap of muslin still snaked between her hands, her red-rimmed eyes watching him silently approach. He stood nearly a head over her as he came to a stop, gripping her shoulders. Then he bent to kiss her on the cheek and brushed his hand across the other side of her face, wrinkled with worry and work, childbearing and thirty-three winters enduring this land. Her eyes flooded, and she bit her lip as he turned from her.
Quickly he clambered up the ladder, scattering the three youngest as they scrambled back to their grass-filled ticks and their wool blankets like a covey of chicks.
It would be a frosty night, he told himself as he lay down in the darkness, watching the last of the fire’s light flicker in reflection against the roof of the cabin above him. Colder still come first light.
His father was right: he did have a choice to make.
And he knew he’d have to make it before first light.
Some of them squeaked, so he reminded himself to count the rungs on the ladder as he settled his weight on each of them one by one. Fifth one down he skipped altogether, sliding past it, his hands and feet gripping the ladder’s uprights as he descended into the cabin’s darkness suffused only with a faint crimson glow from the coals banked in the fireplace.
Even at this murky, early hour just before pre-dawn gray drained from the sky above, the puncheon floor wasn’t that cold beneath his bare feet, although from time to time he could see red wisps of his frosty breath before his face in what muted light the dying fire radiated. Especially when he turned in the direction of the stone fireplace, moving one slow step at a time, making his way toward the corner where his father had leaned the rifle.
From the moment his head had struck the pillow stuffed with wool batting, Titus had slipped in and out of sleep for the rest of the night. At first he listened to the sounds of his parents arguing, then talking. Eventually his father was the only one saying anything. His mother had gone about her business of making dough to rise before the hearth overnight, then made her way to bed. Thaddeus wasn’t far behind her, delaying only to finish his pipe there in the glow of the fireplace as the candles were snuffed. There in the silence of his home.
Gazing down on him from the sleeping loft, Titus thought how at peace his father looked as he sat in his chair. Satisfied, secure, perhaps completely content with his lot, with the niche he had carved out for himself in life.
At long last Thaddeus stood and laid his pipe on the mantel, perhaps near that letter from the schoolmaster, and pushed past those three blankets hanging from nails to separate his bedchamber from the main room. Titus heard the rope bed creak in protest as his father settled next to his mother, then a shuffling of blankets, followed by a sigh of making one’s own place—like that of old Tink when he spun round and round and finally made a nest for himself under the porch.
Still Titus waited, awake beneath his blankets and down coverlet, propping an arm under his cheek to doze as he let the next few hours pass. He would awaken with a start and immediately turn to look through the small mullioned panes at the sky—trying to assess the passage of time by the whirl of the stars in that small patch of
