This Old World

by Steve Wiegenstein

  Off in the other direction, in the north fields, she could see Turner at work with his grubhoe, creeping his way through the rows of corn, with Josephine right behind him. She followed him wherever he went these days, wordless, as if watching a particularly interesting moth. Marie liked this new interest sometimes—it was good for Josephine to get to know the man, and good for Turner to find it within himself to acknowledge her, and someday they would find a way to tell her that he was her father—but most of the time it bothered her. After five years of Josephine’s constant presence, it was troubling to have her attach herself so suddenly to someone else.

  As for Turner, he had sneaked a couple of moony looks but had not managed to speak to her yet. Just as well. She didn’t have the words for him. They had parted well, with no sense of harshness between them, and Turner’s letters—always addressed to Josephine—had never crossed into impropriety. And in truth, Turner had spoken to almost no one since his return. He emerged from his house, went to work, ate in silence.

  As Marie stood in the street, she became aware that her father had come up beside her. Strange, how as his eyesight failed he had become quieter, more inward, moving around the colony like a drifting apparition. Stranger still, how effortlessly they had changed positions in life. He had always been her fierce protector, even in the dark days after scandal had enveloped them all. But age and infirmity had come upon him faster than she had ever imagined, and now she found herself drawn into the role of his guardian, although his sense of the geography of the colony was so keen that he hardly needed guidance. They stood together in the quiet morning.

  “So the boy’s come back,” he said. “Newton and Adam will be glad of that.”

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Marie replied. “Don’t get too attached. We don’t know what’s going to happen. This father of his could decide to take him away again.”

  “Then I won’t say it.” He smiled blandly in her direction, his blue eyes clouded with blobs of gray.

  “Good. Where’s Kathleen?” she said more softly.

  Mercadier shrugged. “Tending to something. You know that woman, always busy.”

  Marie smiled. A fiend for work, Kathleen was that. “How did you ever persuade that fine woman to marry you, anyway?”

  Her father smiled at the familiar rally. “It’s the fiddle, cherie. A good fiddler always has his pick of the ladies.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s what drew your mother to me, or so she always said.”

  “And I always thought it was your charming manners and your good looks. And of course your fortune.” She took his hand to guide him over the threshold of their house so he could find his way to his bedroom. Angus was still asleep in his old bed in the front room but did not stir. The children might not need their naps nowadays, but their grandfather certainly did.

  She stopped her thought. Grandfather? Josephine’s grandfather, yes, but not Angus’s. She knew what they all were saying was true—that she had no claim of law on the boy, although she had loved and cared for him all these years. As though caring was a mere accident, and this man could sashay in from nowhere and dismiss it all. A damnable law for a contemptible world, a world built by men, where a moment’s spasm in the darkness counted for more than the daily labors of hand and heart.

  Marie shook off her anger. All right, so Flynn had the law. She had the school, and the village, and the boy’s affection. She would find her way.

  Once Mercadier had settled in for his rest, Marie went looking for Kathleen. She was never hard to find; there was the kitchen or the fields.

  This afternoon she was in the kitchen of the Temple, chopping onions into fine slivers. Marie took a knife and began to help. There were a few old potatoes on the cutting board as well. Another night of soup.

  Kathleen seemed to read her thoughts. “We get all our men back,” she said, “and there’ll be some proper farming done around here again.”

  “I surely hope so,” said Marie.

  “Oh, just you watch. And Mr. Turner, he’ll come around, wait and see. He’s no fit man now, but he’ll come round.”

  “Think so?”

  “Oh, child, can you doubt it? I remember when we first came through here in fifty-seven. Father Hogan was convinced you were all a pack of loons, or devil-worshippers, maybe, giving over all your possessions to a man you hardly knew. Just because he had wrote a book. Several sermons we heard on the topic of following worldly deceptions. But I could tell you was people of sense, and your Mr. Turner no flim-flam, either. That kind of thing don’t change.”

  Marie chopped onions and didn’t reply. It would be a fine thing for the Daybreak community to return to itself, no question. But whether it could—whether there was still enough idealism left in its people, left in the world—that was no certainty. And as for Turner, she hardly knew what to think. No flim-flam, well, all right. But would she want him to return to the man he was before the war? Maybe. She still thought of their times together, not that she wanted them to return, but Lord, there was something to be said for the words of an eloquent man. Words of love or words of leadership all flowed from similar springs.

  She looked up to see that Kathleen had stopped chopping and stood with her knife paused midair. For a moment she wondered if she had spoken some of her private musings aloud, and felt herself start to blush, but instantly she saw that Kathleen was not looking at her but into the distance, her eyes narrowed, listening.

  “Horsemen,” she said.

  Marie listened as well. Sure enough, she could hear the faraway creaking of tack. Her mind raced. Where were the children? Horsemen only meant soldiers or bushwhackers these days.

  Together they went to the Temple windows and peeked out, each woman instinctively keeping her body behind the wall. Marie pulled out her glasses for a better look. Five men had crossed the ford and were riding into the village slowly, spread out. They all had rifles but kept them in their saddle scabbards. They were young, lean as saplings, and they rode with the easy slouch of long practice.

  “What do you think?” Kathleen said.

  “I think I know one of those boys,” said Marie.

  She stepped out into the open area in front of the Temple and stood waiting, with Kathleen behind her. The horsemen came at a slow walk as if they were on a Sunday excursion.

  “Hello, Charley,” she said as the first man stopped.

  It was Charley Pettibone all right. She thought she had recognized him. He had grown the ghost of a beard, and his light brown hair was long and pulled back. He removed his hat and put it on his thigh.

  “Miss Marie.” He nodded to Kathleen. “Ma’am.”

  Marie knew this man was the Charley Pettibone of the old days, jovial, gabby Charley, the flirtatious boy from Arkansas who had alternately amused and annoyed her with his outrageous teenaged gallantry, but she couldn’t help shuddering at the sight of him now. Old Charley had disappeared. The man who slouched on his horse was lean and predatory, like a gar in the river, all bones and teeth. And a rebel. They killed rebels, and rebels killed them.

  “Coming back to Daybreak, are you?”

  Charley looked off at the ridge behind her. “Well. I don’t know.”

  Marie didn’t know, either. A rebel among them? Living and working? She wasn’t sure she could abide it. “The war’s over.”

  He shrugged. “Guess so. I hear Jo Shelby’s took his army down to Texas, gonna keep up the struggle from down there. Or Mexico maybe.”

  “You wouldn’t go to Mexico, would you?”

  Charley shrugged again and looked away. “Mr. Turner make it through the fight?”

  Marie pointed to the fields, where Turner had seen the men and was walking in. Even from this distance, his movements seemed to her reluctant and pained.

  “I missed you all sometimes,” Charley said.

  She didn’t want to say everything that was on her mind—that at first, when Charley had gone off to join his Arkansas regiment,
it had all seemed like a young man’s lark, to be settled within a few months and patched up over iced cream, but that as the years went by and the roll of the dead steadily grew, those feelings were replaced by the dread and hatred of wartime. When she read in the newspapers about the great battles, she hoped Charley hadn’t gotten killed, but only in a general sort of way, the way one hoped for anything to end with as little harm as possible. But if he had been killed, would she have mourned? Not much. But now was not the time to dredge that up.

  “We missed you, too,” she said.

  Pettibone’s companions shifted restlessly on their horses. Marie thought them a hard looking lot, although none of them looked more than twenty-one or twenty-two. One in particular had a gaze that never rested for long, glancing out from under a flop of greasy black hair, and when it landed on Marie she felt a chill.

  “You said these people would have food for us, Pettibone,” the black-haired man said.

  “We don’t have much,” Kathleen said. “But what we have we’ll share. Tie up your horses and come inside.”

  By now Turner had reached them, Josephine trailing behind. “Well, Charley,” he said, reaching up to shake his hand. “Good to see you’re still on the side of the living.”

  “I’m all right here, then?”

  Turner cast a furtive glance around. “Well, I’m not the one to say,” he said.

  Kathleen took another step forward. “Like I said, step down and have some food. We have soup in the pot.”

  “Pettibone, you said these people would have hams and chickens,” the black-haired man said.

  “Once upon a time, and in some future time, but for now we’re off that diet,” Kathleen said. “Everything’s been stolen.”

  “Blame it on the reb, eh?” the black-haired man said. “I know that game.”

  “I’d say both sides done their part,” Kathleen said, her chin set.

  “I ain’t staying around for thin-man soup. I’ll go on a ways, maybe shoot a coon.”

  “You go right ahead, son.”

  “I ain’t your son.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  Charley interrupted them. “Boys, I think this is where you and I will part,” he said, stepping down from his horse. “If that’s all right with you folks.” Turner just blushed and looked away, and Marie studied the ground. Charley shook hands with the other four riders. “Here’s what you do. This road will take you over three rivers, and after the third one you’re in Arkansas. First town is Pocahontas. Good luck to you.”

  The men rode away as slowly as they had arrived, and the group watched them round the bend in the road. “That one fella’s a bit of a hard case, ma’am,” Pettibone said to Kathleen.

  “I’m a bit of a hard case myself,” she replied.

  “I can see that, yes, ma’am.”

  Marie looked around and discovered that Turner had gone back to the fields and was once again hoeing a row of corn. “You may need to give Mr. Turner some extra time, Charley,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s all right.” Now that the other riders had disappeared, some of Charley’s insouciance seemed to return. “I seen ’em get like that sometimes. Just need a little quiet.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “How about the other boys? Any news?”

  “Colonel Carr was killed,” Marie said. “Prentice, too, and Jesse Wilson. Haven’t heard about anyone else.”

  Pettibone’s face fell. “Good men, good men,” he murmured. “We always had a thing we would say—you’d walk past a man who had fallen, and you’d say, ‘Somebody’s darling.’ Not a superstition, really, just something you should say. Sort of the right thing to do.”

  Kathleen patted him on his arm, and in his face Marie could see the young whippersnapper who had first shown up at the colony as a fifteen-year-old orphan, his belongings in a bag over his shoulder, his fear papered over with bravado.

  “You were a lot of places, then?” Marie said.

  “Oh, yeah. Pea Ridge, Corinth, Pittsburg Landing, Atlanta, Chickamauga, all the way to Bentonville. Richmond in Kentucky, that was a good day for the Fighting Fifth.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now, I start the rest of my life. Them boys, they were wanting to carry on the fight, but me, once I topped the hill to Daybreak I thought, the war’s over. I’m done.”

  Some of Marie’s animosity fell away from her, hearing the fatigue in Charley’s voice. He was right. The war was over. Time to bandage wounds and try to rebuild. “Well, there’s plenty to do around here, and plenty of empty houses. Pick one and move in. And maybe you can bring Mr. Turner out of himself a little.”

  “Anybody in Mr. Webb’s old place?” Marie shook her head. “Maybe I’ll plant myself there, if everybody in the colony agrees.”

  “We haven’t had a community meeting in months. Perhaps you could just talk to Charlotte.”

  “All right,” Pettibone said. “Don’t really matter. I ain’t exactly got a lot of possessions to put down anyplace.”

  As they spoke, the wagon came back across the river, with Charlotte and Michael Flynn side by side on the seat. Charlotte pulled up to where they stood and looked at Charley for a moment before recognizing him.

  “Well, Charley Pettibone,” she said. “You survived.”

  “All my arms and legs still on me, too,” Pettibone said.

  “This is Michael Flynn.” The two men shook hands, although Marie noticed Charley eyeing Flynn’s uniform coat with suspicion. “Mr. Flynn here has acquired forty acres across the river.”

  Flynn gave a tiny nod. Looking at Marie, he said, “I wasn’t my proper self last time I spoke to you, miss. I should have thanked you better for watching Angus all these years.”

  “No luck on your colony, then?”

  To her surprise, Flynn covered his face with his hands, and when he pulled them away, his jaw was working. But his voice was steady. “No, miss. Not a soul, not a sign. Cabins gone to ruin. Don’t know what happened to everyone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d appreciate if you could watch him a little while longer, till I get a house built and land cleared. I’ll pay you, once I get a crop sold.”

  “No need for that. I’m glad to have him.”

  “Charley, do you want to come back to Daybreak?” Charlotte said. “We need all the hands we can get. Maybe you and Mr. Flynn here could share housekeeping on one of the empty places.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I hope to come back,” Charley said. “But I don’t think I care to share quarters no more. Believe I might set up in Mr. Webb’s old house.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” Charlotte said.

  They parted then, each to their own direction. Marie returned home, where Angus was beginning to stir from his nap; she looked down at him as he rustled in his bed. So she would have him after all, at least for a while, and even when Flynn finished his house he would only be across the river. She smiled. So what if she wasn’t really his mother? Blood wasn’t the only kind of kinship in this world. The kinship of Daybreak was its own sort of blood, the commonality of people who shared ideas and aspirations. Angus was a good boy, helpful and sensitive, and she cared for him—that should count for something.

  * * * *

  Marie decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in the fields. Kathleen didn’t need her help with supper. What the community needed was a good crop. This year, there might not be a cash crop, but at least they would be better nourished, and with the men returning, they could look forward to prosperity the next year, getting some livestock again, and who knows, maybe starting the rope mill. Kathleen was right. Things were on the mend.

  She found a hoe in the barn and walked out to see where she could be of use. Several people were at work in the corn, so she decided to work on the potatoes. They were looking good; the community had managed to save enough potato eyes over the winter for a large field, and most had sprouted. The foliage was a deep, rich green, and so far no sign of potato bugs. They’d have to keep the
children out here later in the summer, though.

  Marie smiled to herself as she weeded around each hill. That Irishman and his ‘I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you.’ That was how most of the world thought, she guessed; nothing had value without a cash price. All buying and selling, getting and spending, as that poet said, whatever his name was. She was glad that she had grown up in the Icarian settlement and here in Daybreak, where at least they were making an effort to break free from those chains. Not that they were succeeding, but there was honor in the attempt. She reached the end of the row and stepped into the shade of an elm tree to cool off before working her way back.

  That was when she noticed Turner walking toward her through the rows of potatoes, fast, his stride long and his face set. For a moment Marie feared that something had happened to Josephine, but Turner’s expression was not anxious or frightened, just intent. He stopped about five feet in front of her.

  “Run away with me,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I’ve been figuring it all out. We can go to California. I’ve got it all figured out. Run away with me.”

  She flung her hoe at him and ran.

  Chapter 4

  Turner woke early the next morning and headed out with his hoe before breakfast. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone. He decided to work in the bean field farthest up the mountain, close to the forest’s edge.

  Work helped quiet the noise in his head, all the conflicting impulses and voices he was trying to sort out. Should he have said what he said to Marie? How could he have not? From outside it looked like madness, he knew—after all those years of war, of missing his home and family, within two weeks to declare his desire to abandon Charlotte and his sons and flee to the West with Marie. And in the waking day it felt like madness to him as well. But in the dark of night, and in his times of isolation in the fields, he felt a different sense of life, a sense that his ordinary wishes and desires were but masks of a deeper calling, one that came to him only in his visions and dreams. So Marie hadn’t agreed to run away with him. Should he have expected anything different? At least she hadn’t gone running to Charlotte. He’d had his say, and now she knew how he felt. Perhaps a few days, a few weeks, would change her mind. Perhaps she would think things over and see them a little differently.