This Old World

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “Do you know what you’re doing, young lady?” he said.

  “About as much as you do.”

  Ignoring his growl, she led the horses onto the ferry, tied down the brake, blocked the wheels, and unhitched the team. Horses on a ferryboat were trouble; you didn’t need to be a teamster to know that.

  Once the horses were safely on the bank again, she pulled the boarding planks up and began the tedious process of pulling the ferry across, hand over hand. At first Wilkinson held onto the wagon as the ferry embarked, tilting into the current, but finally politeness got the better of him.

  “Let me help,” he said, reaching for the back corner rope.

  “It won’t save you anything on the fee,” Marie said.

  “Dear girl! I had no thought of that. I just want to cross this stream as fast as possible.”

  “All right, then. When I get the lead rope set, then you pull yours ahead. Don’t pull yours until mine is firm.”

  They worked their way across the river. As they approached, Cowling stepped forward, holding the bridles of the two horses he had swum across. He backed them onto the ferry, and the men hitched them up.

  “This is a heavy son of a bitch for a skeleton,” Cowling muttered as he urged the horses off the ferry and up the bank.

  “Not the skeleton, it’s the zinc lining and the camphor,” Wilkinson said. Now that the two were out of Mrs. Smith’s earshot, they talked more freely. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to sit on this wagon without them.” Wilkinson nodded to Marie. “Your friend Wickman back there is a fine woodworker.” Marie noticed that all the joints and screw holes on the casket had been sealed with wax.

  “I’m going to stop on the flat ground up ahead and add another horse,” Cowling said. “I don’t like that hill.”

  “A word before I go back across,” Marie said. She drew the two men to her and told them what she had heard about the former Quantrill men.

  “But Quantrill’s dead,” Cowling said. “They killed him last year.”

  “Don’t these boys know the war’s over?” said Wilkinson.

  “Ours is, but theirs isn’t,” Marie told them. “Might never be. Anyway, if you’re stopped, give them whatever they want and don’t tell them you’re from the North. These men are used to killing, and don’t think that the women in your group will save you.”

  “Oh, we read all about this gang during the war,” Wilkinson said. “But Mrs. Smith will never stoop to lying to them. She makes a grand point of her principles.”

  “We’ll not let her do the talking,” said Cowling. “Mrs. Mercadier can talk to them. She can talk to anyone.”

  “Mrs. Mercadier?” asked Marie. “You mean—?”

  It was true, as Marie learned on her next trip over. Jenny, the serving girl, had decided to join the colony, and Marie’s father’s widow, the former Mrs. Flanagan, was taking her place. Mrs. Smith, perching backward in the wagon in her velvet armchair, feigned disappointment at Jenny’s ingratitude, but she was plainly pleased at the trade.

  “And with a name like Mercadier, everyone will think I have gotten myself a French maid, unless she opens her mouth, which a woman of her years will have the sense not to do,” Mrs. Smith said. Mrs. Mercadier, although she was standing beside the wagon, didn’t appear to mind being spoken of in the third person.

  Mrs. Smith refused to get down from her chair, even though the wagon swayed alarmingly as they pulled it onto the ferry. “You’ll cross me over, I have no doubt,” she said. “You’re too tough a little vixen to let me fall.”

  Kathleen avoided Marie’s eye and shrugged in response to her whispered question. “Why not?” she said. “There are plenty of Irish in Philadelphia. I’ll feel at home there. With your father gone, and now Angus gone, I have no reason to stay here.” She gave Marie a searching look. “You should think about that offer Mrs. Smith made you, and yes, I heard about that offer. Sometimes hanging onto a child is not the best thing you can do for it. Just think about it. Mrs. Turner has our address.”

  They embraced after Marie had gotten the ferry safely to the other side, but Marie’s heart felt cold. True, she had no family connection to Kathleen, but was it really that easy for her to leave Daybreak? She remembered when Kathleen had led the group of women and children up the road after their disaster in the wilderness. Hadn’t Daybreak meant something to her then?

  Kathleen seemed to sense her thoughts. She squeezed Marie’s hand as she climbed into the wagon. “Things never last,” she whispered. “Keep looking ahead. That’s what got me through all my years. Two husbands, three boys, three homes lost. Take what life gives you, but do not try to hold onto it. You’ll just bring yourself pain.”

  Marie squeezed her hand in return but said nothing. She could not agree. There had to be something to hold onto in this world, something, anything. One couldn’t just keep letting go.

  Marie roped the ferry across the river one more time with Josephine aboard, although it was clear that everyone who wanted to cross had already done so. She didn’t want to be by herself as the visitors departed.

  The Daybreak residents drifted away to their work one by one, and by the time Marie had reached the bank, only Charlotte Turner and the new girl, Jenny, were left. Marie stepped ashore and tied the ferry to a stump. She greeted Charlotte with a nod and took Jenny’s hands.

  “So you’re staying behind,” she said.

  Jenny’s knee bobbed in a half-curtsey, a reflex movement that she was clearly trying to stop. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

  “Well, you follow the lead of this woman here,” Marie said. “Watch her and you won’t go wrong.” Jenny cast a sidelong glance at Charlotte, who blushed with pleasure. “Marie, you’re too kind.”

  Marie turned to her and took her by one hand, and for a moment they stood as if in a ring-a-rosy, the three women in the afternoon sunshine. “How old are you, Jenny?” Marie said.

  “Seventeen, ma’am,” and Marie was taken aback at her youth.

  “And you’ve been in service with Mrs. Smith for how long?”

  “Since I was twelve, ma’am.”

  Marie looked more closely at her. She was young, it was true. But her face did not have the softness of youth. “It’s not an easy life out here, but I suppose you’ve seen enough of that to judge for yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am. House service with Mrs. Smith is not as easy as it might have looked from the outside, neither, and I’m inclined to try life on my own shake for a while.”

  Marie remembered herself at Jenny’s age, a girl in years but already a woman in experience of the shocks of life, her mother gone from the cholera and her father raising her as best he could, their settlement dissolving in strife. The rosy accounts of Daybreak they had read made it seem like paradise, light work and weighty conversation, and while they knew it could not be as ideal as portrayed, still the dream had carried them along. She had been about the same age when she first arrived, and likely no wiser. And was this the place where a single young woman could make a life on her own? No worse than the rest of the country, that was for sure.

  The three of them watched as the wagons disappeared up the hill. Kathleen did not turn around or look back. Take what life gives you, eh? Hardly a philosophy, but perhaps a way to cope. Marie watched the road for a moment, then turned toward home. She could see Josephine waiting on the ferry, invisible through stillness, observant as always. The sun was dropping low. Two more hours, maybe three, before Michael would be home.

  And here came John Wesley Wickman, up from the village at a fast walk, an ill-concealed look of agitation on his face. He reached the three of them and stood uncertainly, clearing his throat and scratching his head.

  “Mr. Wickman?” Charlotte finally said.

  “After all this fuss with Mrs. Smith and her retinue, I decided to go fishing,” he said.

  The women waited.

  “Down river, under those sycamore trees, where the channel takes a bend to the left.” He scuffed his fe
et in the dirt of the riverbank, and they waited. Wickman turned to Marie.

  “And I found your Angus.”

  Arms reached for her as she fell.

  Chapter 18

  Turner sat up in bed in the dark, his eyes open. It had been the death of Newton Carr again, one of the many deaths that visited him in the night. Strange, which ones came back over and over. Colonel Carr. The rebel on the hilltop. And the one-armed man he had killed so many years ago, buried across the river in what was now Michael Flynn’s hog lot.

  They didn’t haunt him, exactly, and he didn’t know why out of the thousands of men he had seen die and dozens of men he had killed, these were the ones who inhabited his dreams. There was no particular fear or emotion, although afterward he felt an overwhelming sadness, a sadness that burdened him for days. The dreams were the same: he returned to the moments of their deaths and saw them die.

  He looked to the window. No sign of any light from the sky. Might as well try to sleep, although probably futile.

  It had been the boy who had stirred this all up again, no doubt. Wickman’s fishhook had caught the boy’s shoelaces—a remarkable coincidence, to be sure—and when he saw what he had dragged up, he had the sense to leave the boy in the shallows rather than try to pull him all the way out. He ran to find help, and when Turner and the other men arrived, they knew immediately to keep the women away, for the water had done its work and Angus’s clothing was the only thing keeping his body together.

  Turner sent Wickman to the barn for a horse blanket. When he returned, they waded in on each side of the boy’s body, stretching the blanket between them. They lowered the blanket into the river, and once it became soaked they held it to the bottom on the downstream side of the body.

  “Just grip it tight,” Turner said, and inch by inch they slid the blanket up beneath the boy until the moment when the current caught him and he drifted into it, and a man cut the fishing line and Wickman and Turner folded up the blanket with the boy inside, slowly, letting the water drain out, and carried him to the bank. Someone stepped up for a closer look, but Turner kept the corners tight in his hands. “Nobody needs to see,” he said. “John Wesley, bring your harness kit.”

  They sewed the blanket shut and stood in silence. Then Wickman quietly recited the 23rd Psalm, a few others joined in, and that moment set them in motion again.

  Everyone assumed that Michael Flynn would go mad when they brought the body back, so by unspoken agreement four of the men walked south to meet him when he came home from his railroad work, in case things went bad. But he took the news in silence and walked past them.

  “We can help you bury him,” Turner said.

  Flynn glanced over his shoulder. “Won’t need it.”

  By the time they returned to Daybreak, the women had gathered up the body in its blanket and placed it on the ferry. Marie, revived with a splash of river water, rested her hand on it as Flynn silently pushed off from the shore and looped the ferry across on its heavy rope. Josephine squatted at the far end, gazing into the woods.

  Since then they had seen little of them, though the children recounted from Josephine that Flynn had wrapped his son in another blanket that night and carried it, still dripping, into the far fields of his property, burying him alone and in darkness, and from that time had alternated between terrifying rages and equally terrifying bouts of silence. When pressed as to whether his rages had crossed into violence, Josephine was, as always, evasive. Turner’s dreams returned, always of those who had gone before, their faces, their voices, the strange angles of their bodies.

  What came back to him about Colonel Carr’s death was that he had been looking straight at Turner when it happened. He was giving morning orders, and said, “Tell Williams—” when the Minie ball hit him in the eye. They always buzzed as they flew, a horrible whining buzz like an insanely powerful bee, so you knew one was coming an instant before it arrived. That one had a lower, spent sound; it had traveled a long way and was at the end of its arc. So for the smallest of moments, Carr must have heard his death arriving, maybe even seen it as it fell toward him. Too fast to react, and inevitable anyway. No dodging a bullet. Turner had been splashed with Carr’s brains and blood, but then the fighting started, and he had had no time to clean himself off for two days. And people wondered why he didn’t care to talk about the war.

  Charlotte laid her hand on his back. “Is it morning?”

  “No.” He had never told her about that day. He should have told her before now. Some sort of protective urge, he guessed. Not that Charlotte had ever shown a need to be protected from the truth. “Your father,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I was there when he died. I’ve told you that.”

  She sat up, too. “Yes, you have.” She waited.

  “There was nothing especially heroic about it. We were astride our horses, he was giving me instructions, and a rifle ball came out of the sky, and smack he was dead. Just like that. We never knew where it came from, a sniper, a lucky shot, maybe even an accidental discharge.”

  She continued to rub his back. “Did he say anything?”

  “No. Just fell off his horse.”

  “So he didn’t suffer.”

  Turner thought. Did he suffer? How was he to know? Did the sight of a rifle ball flying toward one’s head at unimaginable speed cause suffering, even if only for the merest of moments? Did the soul, the mind, continue in some state of existence, suffering, after the body had been struck down? But he knew this was mere philosophizing, and not what Charlotte was asking. “No. He was alive one moment, dead the next.”

  She sat up beside him. “Don’t continue to mourn. He died doing his duty. No matter if he wasn’t waving a sword, leading a charge. He wasn’t the sword waver, anyway. You know that.”

  He nodded and rested his head against hers. “I’m not mourning, exactly. I just can’t stop the thoughts from running. They run over and over.” He stopped, not wanting to sound too watery, but then continued. “I think of all the times I have been splashed with blood. Too many times.”

  Turner felt that if he continued in this vein of thought much longer he would start to cry, but he didn’t really care. Charlotte had seen him manly, and she had seen him unmanly.

  To his surprise she gripped the back of his neck, a little hard. “Don’t

  indulge yourself,” she said, her voice intent. “I’ll not have the man I love

  become one of those blubbering old veterans who gather on the courthouse lawn every Fourth of July. I saw too many of those when I was a little girl. They’d come up to the Point on the anniversary of their battles, tracing out their charges and fortifications like Uncle Toby, and goading the young ones into following their example with all their talk of honor and glory. Mourn as you have need, but don’t you forget that we have work to be done. My father led troops in Mexico, and he came here and built a barn. Both deeds did him honor.”

  Then she stopped herself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound harsh. But I grew so tired of the old warriors rehashing their old wars, and I don’t want us to become like them. This war is like a fever in our veins, and until we purge that fever, we won’t be well.” She paused and her grip became a caress. “I’ve been covered in blood plenty of times myself. Births and healings, mainly. But blood is blood. So we’re both marked.”

  Turner was about to reply when he noticed the light of dawn flickering through the bedroom window. But it wasn’t right, there had been no dawn only a few moments ago, and this light was not the soft gradual brightening it should have been. In an instant he was out of bed, into his trousers, pulling on his boots while he threw off his nightshirt.

  “Something’s on fire,” he said.

  Charlotte was right behind him as he dashed out the back door. They ran north through the village to where the firelight was flickering through the trees. But as they got closer, Turner slowed down, and he gestured for Charlotte to slow down as well.

  The firelight ca
me from no burning house, but from torches carried by a dozen horsemen. They wore homemade masks made from flour sacks with grimacing faces painted on them, and they had arranged themselves in two lines, in front of and behind the cabin where Dathan and Cedeh sometimes stayed.

  “So this is the famous Law and Order League,” Charlotte said in a disgusted tone.

  A big man on the front center horse seemed to be their leader. He waved a revolver, a torch in the other hand. The other men were armed as well but kept their weapons low. Turner pulled Charlotte into the shadow of the empty Mercadier house next door to listen for a moment.

  “Come out, nigger!” the man shouted.

  There was no reply from the dark house, no sound, no sign of movement. The men stirred in their saddles.

  “Don’t make us have to come in there!” the man shouted again. “It’ll go easier on you if you come out on your own. If we come in there’s somebody’s going to get hung!”

  Turner thought of Lysander Smith, and stepped into the ring of light.

  “Gentlemen,” he said.

  The leader wheeled in his saddle, revolver leveled at Turner. Turner walked toward him steadily but slowly until he was standing between him and the front door of the house.

  “You want to share this man’s fate, that’s your business,” the leader snarled. “But I’d advise you to get out of the way.”

  “I’m not accustomed to talking to a grown man with a funny face on,” Turner said. “Makes me feel like Halloween came early this year.”

  “Oh, a comedian,” the leader said. “We’ll see who’s laughing when I horsewhip you down the road a ways. Right after I hang this nigger and his Indian bride. You hear that in there?” he shouted to the house again. “You’re going to hang by sunup. But come out now and I’ll spare the woman.”

  There was no answer from inside.