Still, he wished he’d had the chance to tell her more, to tell her about the moment. If he had been able to tell her about that, she would have understood.
Strange. He could remember everything about the moment in perfect detail, except where it happened. It was in Virginia, that much he knew. Some engagement, a hill, late in the war. The main army had gone on ahead, and their job was to clean up, secure the lines, collect prisoners. And they had run across a hilltop of rebels, unexpectedly, dug in and not about to surrender.
He’d only been left with a couple of companies, and no artillery. But what had these rebs thought? That they could hold out? Or slip away when nightfall came? It was a fool’s game, putting up resistance. They should have surrendered peacefully and gotten a good meal. But they didn’t, and Turner had to lead his men up the hill.
It was one of those horrid Virginia brushpiles he’d come to hate, all greenbrier and rocks, steeper than any hill had a right to be in that part of the country, and no easy way up. The first fusillade from the hilltop caught several men who hadn’t gotten low enough; standing up to drag them away was out of the question, so they had to let them lie, groaning in the rocks and underbrush. So it was to be a crawl.
The rebs stopped firing in unison after that first round and the rest of the afternoon passed in strange semi-silence, the grunting of men as they crept up the hill punctuated by the occasional roar of a rifle and sizzle of a Minie ball cutting the air. Turner lay on his belly behind a tree, thinking of his next move. There was a protruding rock four feet ahead; it should provide enough cover.
“Get up even with me and then hold,” he called to the men beside him. “Pass it down.”
He scrambled on knees and elbows to the rock. One shot flew over his head, but that was all. He heard scrambling and shots on both sides of him, and far away the thud of a ball on flesh. Twigs crackled overhead as his men returned the fire.
They were just going to have to stand up and make a climb of it, there was no option. He waited a few minutes behind his rock, his cheek pressed to the ground, while he waited for everyone to get into place.
“Fix bayonets,” he said quietly to left and right.
As he waited, the moment came to him. His gaze, which had been fixed on nothing in particular as he lay there, suddenly came into clear focus. He felt as if he could see every leaf on every tree, every twig and branch, every flicker of sunlight. The smells of earth and gunpowder were sharp in his nostrils. A few inches away from his nose was a bloodroot flower. How could he not have noticed it before? It was still and perfect in the dappled shade, each white petal cupped in a soft green leaf like a sheltering hand. How could anything so luminous and holy exist in this place of murder?
It came to him that this was what passed through a man’s mind when he was about to die—the sharpening of the senses, the awareness of the world’s perfection and his own insignificance. So here it was, the moment of his death. And in that moment, the face that appeared before him was not that of Charlotte, or Newton, but of Marie Mercadier.
And in the next moment, a rock the size of a human head flew down from the hilltop and landed on the back of his left calf. The Goddamned graybacks were throwing rocks.
He loosed a cry, which he had meant to be a call to charge, but came out only as a throaty, wordless roar. He rose to his feet, rushing forward as well as he could up the slope, and felt more than saw that the rest of his men had done the same, charging in a fast-closing circle on the rebel breastworks. Rocks flew past his head; one hit him on the shoulder. He stopped long enough to fire and reload.
Turner supposed he should have realized the rebs weren’t holding their fire but had simply run out of ammunition. Well, if they wanted to die here, he would oblige. The defenders were crafty, though, staying hidden behind their earthworks so his men had little to aim at.
When Turner’s men reached the top, the Confederates leaped out of their works and down the hill with bayonets and swords and armloads of rocks, hoping to break through the cordon. There were surprisingly few of them. Directly in front of Turner, a man with a thick beard dashed out with a sword, yelling something unintelligible. For an instant they screamed their own mad wails as they closed, then Turner fired his rifle from his hip. It knocked the man backward, flailing the air with his sword; he slammed against a tree trunk and fell toward him with a look of wild hatred on his face. He landed on top of Turner, three-quarters dead, and they rolled down the hill in a tangle of wood, iron, wool, and blood. The back of Turner’s head struck something, and for a minute he lost consciousness.
When he awoke he opened his eyes but could see nothing. His head was pointing downhill, and there seemed to be a weight that pushed him into the earth. He felt himself becoming part of the earth itself. A moment later, his consciousness returned further, and he realized the weight was that of the dead enemy lying atop him, still face to face, his beard scratching Turner’s forehead and eyes. He gathered his strength and rolled over, sliding the dead soldier a few more feet downhill, and got to his hands and knees.
It was twilight. He could hear men crashing through the woods, although the gunfire had stopped.
“Down here!” he called.
“What side?” a voice above him shouted.
“Union,” he said. “And there’s a body.”
Two men scrambled down the slope, and he could see that they were his. “It’s the captain,” one shouted. “Hey, boys, the captain’s down here! You all right, sir?”
“I think so,” Turner said. He rose to his knees. “I’ll have some bruises.”
“You ever seen anything like that?” said the man. “Chunking rocks and whatnot. I never seen anything like that.”
“How’d we do?”
“Lost three, I think. Maybe more. Got ten bodies up here and yours makes eleven. Dozen or so prisoners and a bunch that got away.”
They regrouped at the top of the hill and laid out the bodies, his men on one side and the rebels on the other. Turner put the men to work collecting names of the dead and setting up camp. The day seemed like a long, vivid dream, an early morning dream from which he was about to wake with a startled gasp of realization that it was not real after all, but just a sequence of strange, powerful images that would haunt him—the white flower, the ground pressed against his face, the man’s expression, the sight of rocks flying out at them from the hilltop, and above all the vision of Marie Mercadier’s face. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. And as he collapsed into sleep that night he decided: he would return to Daybreak, return and claim Marie somehow, although how he would do it he had no idea. This day was a sign. He was meant to have her.
Turner had gotten so lost in remembering that moment—daydreaming, a watcher might have thought—that he was halfway down the row of beans before he came to himself again. He stopped and looked back to make sure he hadn’t accidentally hoed up the beans themselves, but no, they were perfectly done, not a weed to be seen. And in the row behind him was another man, bent over, no hoe, but pulling weeds with swift efficiency.
He was a black man, and all Turner could see was the top of his tight-curled hair as he worked his way around each plant, stooped, dropping to one knee from time to time. Even on the warm May morning, he wore a heavy canvas coat that hung well over his wrists.
The man glanced up as he became aware of Turner watching him, then returned to his work as if nothing was odd.
“I can’t pay you,” Turner said. “I don’t have any money to pay you.”
The man worked on.
“I really mean that. I can’t pay you.”
The man shrugged.
Turner returned to his row, and for several minutes they worked in silence.
Finally the man said, “Never did care for a hoe. Always liked to be down where I could see.”
“That right?”
The man shrugged and moved to the next plant. “Guess you must have been a field hand before the war, then,” Turner said.
&
nbsp; “Yessir. Still am one, I reckon,” the man said.
“What’s your name, then?”
The man cast a quick look at Turner, then looked away. “People call me Dathan,” he said.
“Dathan, eh? Dathan what?”
“Just Dathan.”
“Where’d you come from?”
With a flick of his eyes, Dathan looked east.
“That way? Bootheel? Tennessee? Maybe you had an owner down there, and that’s your last name.”
The answer came quickly. “Nosir. That ain’t it. If I got a name, that ain’t it, I know for sure. Just Dathan is all I need.”
“Very well. My name is Turner.” He extended his hand to shake, but Dathan displayed two handfuls of weeds and went back to his work.
They worked in silence for a few hours, until Turner grew thirsty. “Let’s go to the spring,” he said to Dathan, who wordlessly followed him to the springhouse. They sat on the cool rock slabs inside the building, Turner sipping from the gourd, while Dathan cupped his hands and drank directly from the pool.
“You’re quite a worker,” Turner said. “I’ll make sure you get a good meal before you go. Where are you heading?”
Dathan looked at Turner and for the first time did not look away. His eyes were luminous, and his skin so dark it seemed to have a cast of purple beneath the brown. For the first time, Turner noticed that the man had a scar running across the width of his forehead. “Ain’t headed nowhere in particular,” he said. “Wherever the Lord sees fit to place me, I guess.”
His gaze was disconcerting. Turner felt an eerie sense of recognition come over him. “Do I know you?” he said. “Have we met somewhere?”
“Now, that don’t make no sense,” Dathan said.
But Turner’s feeling was getting stronger. “I think we have,” he said. “I think we have.” He looked into Dathan’s eyes, hoping for insight. “But where?”
Dathan stood up and started for the springhouse door. “We got weeds to pull,” he said.
A wild idea came to Turner’s mind. “Did you ever try to run away with a man up this direction?” he asked. “A white man, kind of a crazy fellow? Seven years ago, maybe eight?”
“I ain’t got no idea what you’re talking about,” Dathan said. “I ain’t known no crazy white man.”
“Yes,” Turner said. The idea was becoming fixed in his mind. “And there were slave-catchers who followed, caught up with them ten miles or so south of here. They killed the abolitionist and took you back.”
“I ain’t got no idea,” Dathan said.
“It’s all right. I was there, that man was a friend of mine, or at least I knew him. I remember now.”
“Maybe you got me mixed up.”
Just then, the springhouse door opened, and Charley Pettibone walked in, mopping his brow with a bandana. His hair was dripping sweat off the ends. He stopped and blinked to clear his vision in the darkness of the springhouse.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed, catching sight of first Dathan and then Turner. Pettibone looked from one man to the other. “Who the hell is this?”
“Charley, this is Dathan,” Turner said. “He’s been up in the bean field with me this morning.”
Pettibone’s face clouded. “I ain’t working with no nigger, Mr. Turner,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re about here, but I ain’t working, nor eating, nor living with one, either. I ain’t in for that in no way, and that’s that.” He took the gourd from Turner’s hand and looked suspiciously at it, as if it were part of a conspiracy as well.
Dathan had sidled his way to the door without speaking and was about to leave, but Pettibone held his arm. “Slave or free, you’re still a nigger, and don’t forget it,” he said.
“Charley, this man just showed up and started working, and did a fine job of it, too,” Turner said. Pettibone wordlessly filled the gourd from the spring and drank, ignoring him. Turner thought about pressing the matter but decided against it; of course Charley’s feelings would still be raw. Dathan was right; there were beans to hoe. He could change the world another day. When he turned to leave, Dathan had disappeared.
Turner found him back in the fields, working on the next row. “Sorry about that,” he muttered.
“Ain’t nothing,” Dathan said.
“Charley is a good man, and this is a good place,” he said. “He’s just—he fought on the other side in the war, and I guess he carries that around. It’ll take us all a while to get over it.”
“Yessir,” Dathan said, without looking up. He said nothing else; his voice was flat and bland, and in that simple phrase, Turner felt as if he could hear the opening of a vast gulf, a gap the size of an ocean and just as unnavigable. Wasn’t this what they had hoped to eradicate, this inequality of man and man? And here it was as strong and fierce as ever.
“We have empty houses,” Turner said, not quite knowing what he was going to say next. “A lot of our boys didn’t come back from the war, so three houses up on the north side of the village are sitting empty. Maybe you can stay a while.”
Dathan kept working in silence. Turner wondered if he had crossed a line. They reached the end of their rows and stopped to straighten. In the woods across the river they could see leaves shaking and hear the chok of an axe; that man Flynn was clearing ground in the forty acres that the community had sold him.
“You own them houses?” Dathan said.
“Not exactly,” said Turner. “We all do.”
“Thought so.”
From the Temple, Mrs. Wickman stepped out with a wooden spoon in her hand and walked to a sheet of tin they had recovered from a burned-out house down the valley. She banged on the tin, sending a clanging roll of sound through the village.
“Let’s eat,” Turner said. “Then two more rows and we’re done.” He laid his hoe aside and began to walk down the hill.
“I’ll just find me a shady spot, I think,” Dathan said. “Have me some more of that good spring water.”
Before they got to the village, Dathan veered off the path and headed for the river. “I’ll be over here,” he said.
Inside the hall, Turner filled a heaping plate of beans and cornbread. Seeing Charlotte’s questioning look, he stepped to the side of the room with her.
“There’s a man outside. He’s worked with me all morning.” He could not hide the excitement in his voice. “I think it’s the man Lysander Smith was trying to escape with.”
“Did he tell you this?”
“No. He’s being very guarded. But I recognize him.”
“Are you sure?”
Turner paused. “Yes. I’m sure of it.”
“Why did he come here?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, he holds his thoughts close.” Turner thought for a moment longer, then decided to let it out. “Charlotte, I want this man to stay here for a while. I feel like I owe him something. I want him to stay in one of the empty houses.”
She looked out at the group of people eating their meal in the Temple, then back at Turner. Then she took the plate from his hand. “Let’s go meet this man. What’s his name?”
“Dathan.”
Charlotte squinted. “Odd choice.”
Together they walked down the center street of Daybreak. “He’s around here somewhere,” Turner said. And sure enough, there was Dathan, sitting by the river in the grove of cottonwood trees just south of the old hemp mill, watching the water flow by. The old mill was nothing but a wooden frame now. All the metal parts had been scavenged, except for the wheel in the river, idly turning in its frame. Charlotte handed him the plate as he scrambled to his feet.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said. “I hear you’ve been working hard this morning.”
“I do my best, ma’am,” Dathan said. He didn’t sit down again, but ate standing.
“Dathan, eh? How’d you ever get that name?”
“Don’t know, ma’am. Just come with me, I guess.”
“Back in the slave days? Master give it to
you?”
“Can’t say as I know anything about that, ma’am.”
“My husband here thinks he might have seen you before, some years ago.”
“I told him, ma’am, don’t think he remembers too good.”
“It’s not a crime, you know, running away. Not anymore. That whole life is over and done with.”
“Yes, ma’am.” But he said no more.
Charlotte sized him up. “So, you’re a good hand in the fields?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Real steady, is what they say. Ain’t fast. Real steady.”
“Well, we’re short, as you can probably tell. Here’s what. You stay and get us through the season, there’s a roof over your head and food, and we all share in what’s brought in at the end. How’s that sound?”
Dathan had finished his last spoonful of beans and was mopping up the juice with the cornbread. “Sounds fine, ma’am.”
“All right, then. Bring your things this evening and we’ll pick out an empty house.” She took the empty plate from his hand and turned to go. “James, I suppose we need to get you a meal, too.”
As they returned to the Temple, Turner said eagerly, “You will not regret this. I am sure of it.”
She gave him a sidelong look, and in that glance Turner imagined that she was thinking of the many times when he had rushed into things, and the regrets that had come of them. But he said nothing. Of course she was right. She was always right. And that was what tired him out so, sometimes. Yes, he acted impulsively, and yes, perhaps this man was not the beaten slave he had glimpsed so long ago. And yes, only this morning he had been daydreaming of Marie, and thinking to act impulsively again, to fly the roost entirely. So he was wrong, wrong, wrong. He was the wrong man for them all, no leader, not even a proper soldier, hardly the man whose judgment could be trusted in even the small things. He had led them all to this place, he had led men to their deaths, he would probably lead them all astray again if given the chance. The hell with it. Responsibility was for those who craved it, and he no longer did.
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