This Old World

by Steve Wiegenstein

  Josephine Mercadier shrank in the corner, gripping the carving knife in a small bloody hand.

  Marie lay motionless in the middle of the floor.

  And James Turner, knocked off his chair by the force of the blast, struggled to stand but could only manage to get to one knee. His right side was drenched in blood from the shoulder down, and his right arm dangled, limp. He tried once more to reach his feet but couldn’t hold himself up, and after a second he sank to the floor, his back against the wall, and stretched out his feet with a deep sigh.

  Charlotte knelt at Turner’s side and loosened the collar button on his shirt. “Here, now,” she murmured. “Here, now. Let’s ease this up.” She palpated Turner’s shoulder gently. Frowning, Charlotte glanced back at Charley.

  “Put your cheek to her mouth and see if she’s breathing,” she said, nodding toward Marie.

  Charley leaned over Marie’s face. He felt strange being so near to those lips he had so longed for, now motionless. Those bright eyes now closed.

  As instructed he turned his cheek and waited. Was there something? There was. A breath, light but warm, unmistakable. Another.

  “She’s alive!” he cried.

  Willingham arrived at the back door now and took in the scene. “Ma’am,” he said. “Mr. Turner, you’re hurt.”

  Charlotte didn’t answer him. “Child, bring me that knife,” she said. Josephine edged forward with the knife held out butt first. Charlotte took it, her lips pressed together tightly, and cut away Turner’s shirtsleeve, laying the knife on the floor beside her as soon as she finished.

  Turner breathed hard, sucking air through clenched teeth as Charlotte explored the wound, but although his brow was sweaty he showed no obvious sign of pain. Charlotte held her face close to his.

  “You’re still bleeding, and not just a little,” she told him. “It won’t be easy to stop. All right?”

  Turner nodded and closed his eyes.

  Charlotte was now gripping into Turner’s shoulder with both hands. “Charley, I need you,” she said. “We’ll tend to Marie later.”

  Willingham spoke up, still in the doorway. “I’ll help you how I can, ma’am.”

  Charlotte glanced up. “My son will be coming through the front door any minute now. You can help by keeping him calm and out of the way.” She returned her focus to Turner. “Charley, in my right apron pocket is a sewing kit in a leather pouch. Thread a needle for me with a couple of feet of thread.”

  Charley found the kit and with trembling fingers tried to thread the needle, but his hands were too large and clumsy. He cast a wordless plea to Josephine, who stepped forward from her spot in the corner, threaded the needle, and handed it back to Charley.

  “Good show, young’un,” Willingham said.

  “Be quiet, Mr. Willingham,” said Charlotte. “I’m trying to think. All right, Charley, lean in here.”

  Charley peered over her shoulder. Turner’s right arm was badly mangled, with bone and gristle visible beneath a sheen of bright blood. The main artery had been pierced. Charlotte had groped her way to it and was pinching it closed between her thumbs and forefingers.

  “Put that needle and thread on the floor here beside me, then reach in and squeeze behind where I’m squeezing,” she said. “It’s slippery, so hold tight. Use both hands.”

  There was little room to maneuver. With Turner leaned against the wall, Charley had to stand behind him, facing Charlotte with Turner’s wounded arm between them. He reached in and pinched where she had directed him, pushing aside torn flesh to find his grip.

  “Do you have it?” Charlotte said.

  Charley could feel the rush of blood pressing against his fingers. He nodded.

  “All right.” She released her grip and found the needle and thread on the floor beside her. In a dozen swift passes she sewed a tight whipstitch around the tattered end of the vessel. “Let’s see how this holds. Loosen up just a bit.”

  Charley relaxed his fingers, and together they peered at the artery as blood flowed in. It swelled; it oozed, but it held.

  A sigh of relief escaped Charley’s lips, but Charlotte didn’t relax. “Support that arm,” she told him, and then she pressed her face close to Turner’s. “James,” she said, quietly but intently. “There’s no more blood flowing to this arm, and the bone is broken clean through. Do you understand?”

  Turner’s face was the gray of the first film of ice on the river on a winter’s morning. Sweat glistened on his forehead. He mouthed a “yes.”

  Charlotte said nothing more but picked up the carving knife where she had laid it. In two hard strokes she severed the remaining muscle and tendons, and Turner’s arm sagged into Charley’s hands, strangely heavy and inert all of a sudden. She leaned back on her heels and wiped her face, then untied her apron, folding it into a square which she pressed against the wound. “Take that somewhere safe, please,” she said to Charley. As he rose to his feet, she looked at Willingham, standing in the doorway.

  “Your belt,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I need your belt to cinch up this compress until we make a more lasting one,” she said. “I can’t hold this forever.”

  Willingham loosened his belt and brought it over. At a nod from Charlotte, he tucked it under Turner’s left armpit and pulled it around the folded apron, buckling it in front.

  “Tighter,” she said.

  Turner stirred under the pressure of the makeshift compress and for a moment tried to rise again, but his feet kicked aimlessly as Willingham held him down. He summoned a breath.

  “Why bother?” Turner said.

  Charlotte took his chin in her bloody hand and lifted his face to hers.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “No you don’t. If I lose you, I’ll not have it be because you lacked the will.”

  Turner managed a smile. “My Charlotte,” he said.

  “Yours indeed,” she said.

  She glanced up at Charley with a look that was challenging, almost angry, and he stood up, startled. He should have carried off the severed limb sooner.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and staggered out the back door into the bright morning with his ghastly load.

  Chapter 27

  There was a gap. Had he slept or lost consciousness? Was there a difference? Turner wasn’t sure.

  He was at home now, propped up on pillows, his wound packed and tightly bound. He couldn’t remember crossing the river. But here he was, home to die.

  He knew they all wanted him to heal up and go on. He could see Charlotte standing at a table in the corner, mashing boiled slippery elm bark and folding it into squares of cloth for fresh poultices. Couldn’t blame her. He didn’t want to die. But from somewhere in the middle of his body, he felt—what? Not cold exactly. Just … absent. Not there.

  Dead.

  That’s all they’d wanted during the war, the chance to die the way a man should, at home, surrounded by family, with a few words to share. So many men had been denied that—blown to smithereens, or trampled in a charge, or simply groaning their way to eternity in a field hospital with no one to hear their final words but a passing aide or, if they were fortunate, a comrade. So he was a lucky man.

  His arm—or the place where his arm ought to be—didn’t feel dead, though. It burned and prickled fiercely. He yearned to scratch it but didn’t have the strength. Fool, to think he could scratch what wasn’t even there.

  Adam was hovering nearby and Newton lingered in the doorway. He needed to talk to them. He needed words. He needed breath.

  A face came out of the blur at the edge of his vision. Harley Willingham.

  “I sent Charley Pettibone to see if he couldn’t find that fella before he got lost in the woods somewhere,” Willingham said. As if it mattered to Turner what happened to Flynn. “Just wondering, was that there an accident or did he mean to shoot you?”

  He turned his head to the left to get Willingham out of his view and tried to wave him away. Accident
al or intentional? What did it matter? Flynn had been wanting to shoot him for years, and it finally happened. Perhaps in all accidents there was some intent, and in all deliberate deeds some amount of accident. He didn’t want to think about it.

  What was it that old Newton Carr used to say? The thrown stone. That was him all right. Flung up high and bright, and now falling, about to make his little splash and sink to the bottom of the pond with hardly more than a ripple.

  Newton Carr. He watched Charlotte laboring over her poultices. There was a woman who had borne her share of grief. Sister, mother, father, now him.

  And Adam. Adam Cabot.

  Jealousy had long since burned out of him, leaving only the ache of loss. Of course Adam had loved Charlotte. Who wouldn’t? Old loves and old losses, washed downstream now like an early season flood, leaving only the driftwood lodged high in the trees as a sign of its passing.

  For some reason Turner’s own father came into his mind. He could barely remember what he looked like now—just a blurry assemblage of a thick beard, intense eyes, and the smell of tobacco. The spring he had turned nine, his father had taken him overland in the wagon to Shawneetown and from there by boat to Cincinnati, three days’ travel, to hear the debate between Robert Owen and Alexander Campbell over the existence of God and the truth of the Bible. For nine days, the Welsh atheist, brought upriver from New Harmony, stood on one side of the platform and the frontier theologian on the other. A shiver of repugnance ran through the crowd every time Owen got up to speak, repugnance that turned to grudging admiration as he detailed the ills of society, ills he was personally working to remedy. Then he would offhandedly deny some deep truth of the Bible—not argue against it, just deny it, as if it were the merest of fairy tales—and the crowd would groan and cry out. Campbell would rise, his bony face solemn. He recited passages in the original language to show how they had been misunderstood over the centuries. No orator, he had to be prompted to speak up from time to time. Turner had thrilled at the two debaters, the sway of the crowd packed into the pews, the arguments flying over his head like swallows.

  That was where it had all begun, he supposed. The love of oratory, the thrill of the lecture circuit, the fascination with grand ideas that he could never entirely comprehend. The ambition. The hunger for applause, which now felt so vain and ephemeral. All from a childhood trip with his father.

  What would his children remember of him? What had he done that would shape their lives? He would never know. Newton, slouched against the doorframe, frowning at the floor—what was he thinking? And Adam, lingering but afraid to come too close, unable to take his eyes off the bandaged absence that was once his right arm. Would he remember anything of him besides that?

  And Josephine. Where was Josephine?

  “She’s here,” Charlotte said from the corner. “Right outside the room. I think she’s a little shy to come in.”

  Had he been speaking aloud? He hadn’t realized. And for how long? The borders between inside and outside were getting blurry.

  He wondered about Marie but was afraid to ask. But Charlotte sensed his need and walked over to the bed. “Marie’s still alive,” she murmured. “Not conscious yet, but her breathing is regular. We’ll see how she comes out.” She turned to her work but paused. “Your going over there probably stopped him from killing her, I imagine.”

  Well, that was good. Better alive than dead. His feeling of relief should have been greater, it seemed to him, but somehow he could manage nothing more than a sense of mild satisfaction. Emotions were bleaching from him once again. That was how they had made it through the war, by tamping down their emotions with the idea that they weren’t losing them, but rather banking them for the future. When the war was over, they would all return to feeling again, to normality, to the simple joys and sadnesses of the life before.

  The war. That’s what would shape those children, the violence and privation, not anything he had done. His meager efforts to change the world had been washed away by that great tide. He couldn’t foresee who was going to inherit the earth, but it wasn’t the meek.

  “Children,” he said. Charlotte divined his meaning and pushed the boys toward him, on the left side of the bed so they wouldn’t have to come too close to his wounded side. She disappeared into the front room and brought out Josephine, holding her hand, reluctant but yielding.

  That man on the hill, the hate in his eyes as he charged him with his bayonet fixed. He had to have known he was racing toward death, but hate had overpowered his need to live. They’d all done it, that rush toward the cold embrace, and it had marked them. The ordinary sensations had not been banked, but lost. His generation had become like whiskey barrels, smooth and regular on the outside, but with an interior that was charred, hollow, scoured, shiny black. It was just as well they all die off, to clear some space for the next generation. Clear the stumps so the crops could grow.

  The children shuffled nervously before him, and he returned to the present moment. What was there to say to them that was worth a damn?

  “I’ve been the man killing, and I’ve been the man killed,” he said, and it felt as if his breath had left him altogether. “This is better.”

  His gaze wandered to the window. He couldn’t see much from this angle—a slice of sky and a blotch of tree. That was enough. When his attention came back to the room, the children had gone.

  Charlotte in the corner, folding, pressing, stacking, her every movement an exercise in controlled ferocity. As if she could stave off inevitability through labor. Turner waited until he was sure he had enough breath for his words to carry across the room.

  “Stop working. Come sit with me and hold my hand.”

  She looked up, startled. Then her face softened and she came over, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat on the stool beside the bed that the children had just vacated and took his hand, her hair glowing in the windowlight, and Turner could see that her eyes were glistening.

  They held their silence for a while.

  “You’re not finished,” she said.

  Turner didn’t answer. There seemed no point in arguing, and he’d been wrong before. But he felt finished. The work—the work would never be

  finished. There was work enough for the centuries if they chose it. But inside, he felt a growing emptiness.

  He had so much he wanted to say. Always his condition, too many words and not enough time. Her hair, floating like a vapor. The faint freckles on her cheeks. Her pale blue eyes, so penetrating and intense at times, so luminous now, soft as air. How could he ever bear to lose sight of these things? How could he tell her all this, now, so late, with so few words left?

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” she replied.

  There was more to say. There was so much more to say.

  He closed his eyes.

  Chapter 28

  Charley Pettibone, riding the five-year-old mare that was the best of the Daybreak stable, had no trouble following Flynn’s wagon by the trail of castoffs that led up the hill—chairs, trunks, a splitting maul and wedges, clothing. When the road leveled off at the top, the wagon’s path was still easy to mark. Flynn had turned off the main road at the Indian camp, where the old trail to the southeast branched out through the forest, and even the poorest of woodsmen could track the bent saplings and broken weed stalks.

  Before striking out on his chase, Charley had reclaimed his revolver from Willingham and stopped at his cabin to fetch his Enfield rifle, which the

  Federals had let him keep after the Surrender. His pistol wasn’t the true Connecticut Colt revolver, just one of the Southern copies, and he doubted its accuracy at any sort of range. But the weight of it in his belt was reassuring. He’d stared down the barrel of Flynn’s shotgun unarmed once and didn’t care to repeat the experience.

  He figured Flynn had gotten a three-hour head start or more, by the time he’d finished helping get Turner across the river, cleaned up, equipped himself, and saddled
a horse. Flynn would be pushing to cross the county line, no doubt, but he surely couldn’t make it before nightfall. He’d have to stop somewhere. Charley had made a silent bargain with himself. If Flynn stopped to rest before the county line, be it house or barn or roadside wagon camp, he’d wait until he was sound asleep and then creep up on him, bring him back for Willingham and the course of the law. But if he had made it out of Willingham’s jurisdiction—well then, too bad for Michael Flynn. There was more than one reason people tried to get across boundary lines.

  After a couple of hours the trail reached a better road, or at least some ruts that weren’t as overgrown in the middle, and Charley paused to think. Flynn would be avoiding the towns. So he wouldn’t have turned left, toward Fredericktown. Charley bore right, though the road drifted south over the next couple of miles, and he guessed that Flynn would take his next opportunity to head east again.

  Another mile, and he passed the remains of a cornfield, with an old man gleaning grains from the ground. It was going to be a hard winter ahead.

  “Did a man with a wagon pass by here earlier? Loaded down?” he called out.

  The man looked up. “I expect so.”

  “How long ago?”

  The old man squinted at the sky. “Couple of hours, maybe. It was past noon for sure. I was in that hayfield yonder when he passed, and I didn’t get there till noon or more.”

  “I don’t need your life story. Did he say where he was going?”

  “He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. He didn’t look like a man who wanted asking. Had a big bandage around his head.”

  Charley nodded. If Charley had had any food to share, he’d have left it with the man, but he’d only tossed some salted potatoes and slices of bread into his satchel before leaving. He nudged his horse on.

  Another mile down the road, and he developed the sense of being followed. Not that Flynn was crafty enough to circle out and wait; but something in the falling afternoon made him uneasy. So the next time he topped a ridge, he quickly reined out into the woods as soon as he was below the hilltop. He trotted his horse into a clump of cedars, tied it there, and hunch-walked back to where he could see the road behind. He sat down to wait behind a good-sized oak tree, the Enfield across his knees.