On the train to St. Louis, boys had swarmed like gnats, fingering his captain’s bars and peppering him with questions: Had he seen the surrender? Was he there? Did he know Grant? They knew all the names of the generals and the battles, had read about them in the newspapers, he guessed. Turner hadn’t meant to be harsh to the boys. He had opened his mouth a time or two to speak. But nothing came out, so he turned his face to the window until they drifted away.
The door opened, and the brightness of the light from outside made him wince. And there she was.
Charlotte stood in the open doorway a moment, the light haloing her hair and body but leaving her face in darkness. Then she shut the door quietly and stood with her back against it.
Turner stood.
“You’re back,” she said.
He said nothing. He walked toward her tentatively and reached out his hands. She took them and for a moment that’s how they stood, at arm’s length, just touching fingertips. He thought about coming close to kiss her, but something held him back.
She was altogether too thin. Her face was drawn and lined. Turner waited for something beautiful, something eloquent, to say to her. He had always been able to find the words he needed. But this morning he dipped into the well of his mind and came up dry. He simply stood.
Then the spell was broken and she was in his arms, holding him tight with a grip that could break bones. He could feel her fingering his scrawny ribs and shoulder blades.
“Stars in heaven, I have missed you,” he whispered.
“And I you,” she whispered back.
They said nothing else, for there was nothing left to say, nothing that mattered, anyway. They stood pressed together in the dim indoor light.
Several minutes went by as they silently embraced. Then she pulled away and looked him in the eyes. “You must meet your new son,” she said. “Not so new anymore. Adam turned three this month.”
“I know. I toasted his birthday with the men.”
“So is it ‘major,’ now? Will we all have to start calling you ‘major’?”
“Brevet major. They put me back at captain as soon as they got a real soldier to take over.”
He averted his eyes. Take over after her father was killed, that is. Here he was talking about Colonel Carr already, if only by implication. So much for his resolve.
Charlotte pulled him toward the door. “Everyone’s wanting to see you,” she said. “We’re all so proud of you. You and all the men.”
Turner resisted for a moment, feeling unready to face anyone. But her pull was insistent, the happiness on her face clear, and he found himself on the doorstone in the bright morning light.
They were a meager lot now, fifteen or so adults and a handful of children, gathered in a semicircle around the front of the house. There was John Wesley Wickman and Frances, and those two girls must be their twins, Penelope and Sarah, Sarah skipping around in circles and Penelope propped against her mother’s knees, her legs splayed out at a strange angle. It looked to Turner that the girl’s hips, malformed since birth, had not gotten any better. Wickman stepped forward and shook his hand.
“Welcome home, friend,” he said.
And there were all the wives and sweethearts of the Daybreak men still gone to the war, Mrs. Prentice, Mrs. Shepherson, and all the others, their eyes haunted and darting. Some of those wives were widows now, and Turner tried to recall Charlotte’s letters—which ones had lost their husbands and which ones were waiting for a return. And there was Emile Mercadier. Good Lord, he had aged! He leaned on a cane, and his hair was now wispy and white. Something seemed to be wrong with his eyes—they were gray and cloudy, and Turner noticed that he stood with his hand resting lightly on the shoulder of his wife.
And there, at the far edge, trying her best to look away, was Marie, with Josephine standing beside her solemnly, holding her hand.
Turner tried to look away as well but found his gaze returning to her again and again. She would not meet his eye.
He knew words were expected of him. “My friends, my fellow citizens—” he began. And now what to say? He felt empty. “It’s good to be—I’ve missed—” He fought to keep his eyes from returning to Marie and managed to keep his focus on Josephine instead. “I have missed you all,” he stammered out. “I am so happy—”
Then, nothing. He was out of things to say. He found the latchstring to the door behind him and stumbled inside.
Turner’s heart was pounding. Of all the moments to feel afraid! During the war he had been afraid many times but had never retreated, never fled.
He returned to his chair at the table and sat down, wiping sweat from his forehead. The townspeople outside were no doubt perplexed—perhaps he should try to go out again and talk to them. But he could not. They would have to wait until tomorrow.
Charlotte came inside after a minute. “Are you all right?” she said.
“Of course I’m all right. I just—I don’t know, I just didn’t feel like seeing everyone all at once. It was a bit too much.” He forced a smile.
Charlotte said nothing, but her expression was dubious. “I’m sure it’s strange, being back here,” she said. “You’ve gone through a lot.”
Turner knew she was only making an excuse for him, but he didn’t mind. Perhaps he deserved a little coddling for a while. “I’m the first man back, then.”
She nodded, a little hesitantly. “One of the boys from the Irish colony was through here yesterday. But other than him, yes.”
“What news is there?”
“Not much, beyond what I wrote you. Jesse Wilson died early. Prentice was exchanged but had to go back to the fighting. He didn’t last a month after that. No news from Schnack.”
“And Charley Pettibone?”
Charlotte grimaced. “He walked down the road and then he was gone. At least Prentice would send letters to his wife and children, but a young single man like Charley? And with a regiment mustered in Arkansas, we never even read about them in the newspaper. He was fighting on the wrong side. We may never know.”
The cabin door opened, and Newton peered inside.
“It’s all right,” Charlotte said. “He’s all right. You can come in.”
Behind Newton, holding his hand, was a boy of three. He had bright blond hair and eyes that were shockingly pale and blue, the blue of the noonday sky.
“You must be Adam,” Turner said.
Without a pause, the boy climbed onto his lap and kissed his newly shaved cheek. “You have had a hard, hard time of it, is what Aunt Marie says,” he said, pronouncing the word “Aint,” country style. “Aunt Marie says you’re my daddy. Is that so?”
“It is.”
“Angus’s daddy came and took him away. Please don’t do that.”
Newton grabbed Adam’s arm and tried to pull him off Turner’s lap. “Adam is talking nonsense, Mother. Make him stop.”
But Adam clung to Turner’s neck. “I like it here, Daddy. Don’t take me away!”
Turner gently disentangled the boy’s arms and stood him on his feet, pressing him between his knees. “I’ll not take you away, son. I like it here, too. I’m not taking anybody anywhere.”
The boy would not be still, though he had enough sense not to squirm. But his eyes darted, and Turner could tell he wasn’t listening. Newton continued to tug at him until Turner held up a quieting hand.
“Do you hear me, son?” he asked.
Adam finally nodded his head. “Yes, sir.”
“All right, then. You boys need not concern yourselves.”
Charlotte shooed the boys outside, and they tumbled out the door in a flurry of pokes and recriminations, rivals already. She and Turner regarded each other.
“We have a lot to catch up on,” she said.
“No hurry,” Turner said. “I don’t know where to start, anyway.” He looked down at his hands. “The boy is a fine-looking lad. Quite a talker for his age.”
“Marie’s been schooling them.”
“
Aunt Marie?”
“Adam took to calling her that because he knows he’s some relation to Josephine. All the children picked it up, and I think she likes it.”
“Do you mind it?”
Her face was fixed. Turner had seen versions of that face many times in the past few years, the survivor’s face, the face of someone who could not allow lesser troubles to claim the attention due to greater ones. “I don’t have time to mind it. The crops, the bushwhackers.”
“Have they still been bad?”
“The crops or the rebels?” Charlotte sat across the table from him and took his hands. “The crops, not bad for what we can do. But there are so few of us, we can’t manage the fields. The rebels, bad enough for a while, but there’s not much left for them to steal. They’ve mainly gone south and west. You hear of Hildebrand coming through once in a while, but he’s stayed away from here. There’s quite a nest of them over toward Kansas.”
“Well, that should be ending soon.” He watched her face and knew she was waiting for more news about Colonel Carr. “I don’t want to talk about your father right now,” he said. “I am sorry. I am sorry for his death. You know I am. But I don’t want to tell you any more about it. Maybe another day.”
“All right. We can talk about other things.”
A burdening silence fell between them. Turner groped for a thought. For two weeks now, the only thing in his mind had been get home, get home. Now that he was home, nothing else rose up to fill the place where that thought had been. He took a breath. Patience, patience.
“I haven’t gone mad from the war. I want you to know that. I just couldn’t think of what to say out there.”
“Of course not.”
Not that he hadn’t seen it happen, or been close to it himself. There were so many ways to go battle-mad, and he reckoned he had seen most of them. Men would freeze in place, or fail to lift their weapons, or they would stand up from a safe position, cursing crazily into a hail of fire; they would grow deaf or immobile or have phantom pains; they would flee the field, forever shaming themselves and risking execution, even with an officer waving a sword in their faces. Or they would grow sullen and crafty, inward; he had come close to executing a man from his regiment only weeks before the Surrender. They had all known the Surrender was coming; it was only a matter of time. But that didn’t stop the man from breaking. He had gone for water and come back with a horrid case of poison ivy, reported himself unfit for duty. It was obvious he had rubbed it on himself, for his palms and face were covered with the rash, and Turner was about to order him shot on the spot. Something in the man’s blank gaze and indifferent expression stopped him. It would be like shooting an ox.
And himself? He had felt that sensation steal upon him as well. In him it took the form of insensibility, a dull lethargy that made him feel heavy and stupid, bovine, ready to die. There was the time on the hillside in Virginia—
Turner realized that he had gone away for too long, that Charlotte was still sitting across from him, expectant in the silence, while he refought his battles. He smiled at her in embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was off somewhere.”
“So I see,” she said with a smile in return, embarrassed as well. “I imagine you need some rest.”
“Maybe. Or maybe what I need is activity, and lots of it.”
“No shortage of that. The sprouts are taking over the fields, and the rope mill is falling apart. A lot of the houses lost shingles last winter. We’ve done what we could.”
“Well, then.” Turner took his hat and went to the door. Everyone had left; in the bright day he stood on the doorstone and looked out at Daybreak. In the distance he could see figures in the fields, some with hoes, some weeding by hand. It looked as though Charlotte had set them all to growing vegetables in the lower fields. Smart move.
The May morning reminded him of a day just a year ago, a foggy morning, when he had watched from the right as Upton sent twelve regiments against the rebel lines at Spotsylvania, massed shoulder to shoulder, screaming insanely, and with orders not to fire until they reached the breastworks, for firing would mean stopping to reload, and the imperative was speed at all costs. So forward they ran to their deaths over the swampy ground. It was no time for reflection, but Turner had found himself wondering how they all had gotten here, sane men, creatures of reason, singers of songs, now pressing the bodies of their wounded brothers into the mud as they advanced. Those were sounds to be deaf to—the blast and rush of canister, the cries of men, the abominable clanking of steel against steel, and the unmistakable, sickening slide of steel into flesh.
But now he had returned, and they would rebuild Daybreak. They would start anew. Except—
Except there was nothing to believe in about Daybreak any longer. What point was there in talking rot about cooperation and sharing? Men were beasts. Might as well admit it and be done. When they had come out here in the fifties, the world seemed ripe with possibility, human nature capable of improvement, a new social order ready to emerge. The great experiment was to have shown the rest of the country this path, but instead the country took a path of its own, and their pastoral dream now seemed like a relic from an antique time.
And yet what else was there to do? There were children to feed. Life had to go on as before, but it could not go on as before.
Might as well go cut sprouts. Standing in the sunlight Turner wiped his face with his hand. When he pulled his hand away it was wet, and his face was wet.
“Well, I’m a fool,” he said.
But he was still crying, and he couldn’t seem to make it stop. He had gone through the war unhurt, but here he was on his own doorstep, and he could not get to the door behind him, could not step off into the shade of the yard. He was stuck here on the stone, and he could not, could not, could not make it stop.
Chapter 3
Marie Mercadier had almost finished the school day when Michael Flynn showed up at the Temple door with Angus. It had been a week and a half since he had left. Flynn held open the door, and Angus walked quietly into the room, sitting at his usual spot on the second bench.
“Mind your teacher,” Flynn said, then shut the door.
Angus looked neither to left nor right at the curious children who were trying to get his attention. He sat quietly on the bench. Newton Turner handed him a slate and chalk.
Marie tried to keep the class going for another few minutes but couldn’t concentrate. So she let everyone out early and sat beside Angus.
She embraced his skinny body, stroking his hair. Angus didn’t respond but let her hug him all she wanted. He was dirty and had some scratches on his face and arms—from pushing through underbrush, Marie guessed—but looked all right otherwise.
“Did you make it all the way to the Irish colony?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. But there wasn’t anybody there,” he said.
“Have you had anything to eat today?”
“No, ma’am. Daddy said we’d eat when we got here.”
“Well, then.”
She took his hand and led him to her house in the center of the settlement. There wasn’t much food for him at the moment, but a lard sandwich would do. He devoured it eagerly, and when Marie took his shoes off and had him lie down on his old bed for a nap, he made no murmur. Within minutes he was sleeping.
Marie stepped out of her house and tried to think. She felt a great need to be sensible and cool at this moment, to keep her emotions from getting the better of her. She had never spoken of Angus as her son, though she had raised him and loved him, but she could not permit herself the illusion that this Irishman had come to return him. He was too stubborn a brute for anything like that. No, now was the time to take a leaf from Charlotte Turner’s book and let her head rule, size up the situation and decide what was best. That was Charlotte’s great strength, keeping her head. Charlotte had led Daybreak since the war began, and Marie had never seen her panic or lose her composure, not even when raiders came th
rough looking for food, valuables, or enemies to kill. She hadn’t seen Charlotte act emotionally since—
Well, since the day she had discovered her in the act of nature with her husband. Of all the losses Marie had suffered after her liaison with Turner had become known—the cost to her reputation, the pain to her father, the separation from Turner—the one that surprised her most had been the loss of her friendship with Charlotte. Charlotte said she had forgiven her, but the tension between them had never gone away. And how could it?
Marie told herself sometimes that she had been a foolish girl, old enough to know better to be sure, but swept away by the thrill of romance into a liaison before she had time to think. But she knew that was not the truth. If all she had wanted was romance, plenty of amorous young men in the colony would have accommodated her. She had wanted James Turner and no one else. Wanted him with all the knowing intent of a full-grown woman. Call it selfishness or love, it was her own choice, and both she and Charlotte knew it. So it was hard to imagine Charlotte entirely forgiving her, since she had not entirely repented. Marie had thought a few times about leaving the colony, taking Josephine and going west somewhere, covering the trail with a story about how Josephine’s father had been killed in the war, but she had never gone through with it. And of course there was her own father to think of.
Charlotte and the Irishman passed by in the wagon, heading north out of the village. Now where the devil were they going? Marie strolled to the end of the houses to watch them as they crossed the ford, taking a tiny pair of spectacles out of her dress pocket to help her see in the distance. She knew it was vain, but she hated putting on the spectacles; they made her eyes look big. Flynn tied up the horse and wagon to a tree a few feet on the other side of the river and helped Charlotte down; they started walking through the brush. Well, if they wanted to collect ticks and chiggers by the basketful, let them. And why was she giving him the royal tour anyway? Bringing Angus back to the village didn’t make him their friend all of a sudden.
This Old World Page 3