Charley’s usual loquaciousness failed him. “What time?” he finally managed.
“Any time you please, Mr. Pettibone.” She stepped into her door again. “Now excuse me, I need to stir my soup.”
Chapter 29
The grave from which Lysander Smith’s body had been taken was still open, so on a warm afternoon two days after he passed, they buried James Turner in it. Frances Wickman did not leave Charlotte alone until bedtime for those days, and Charlotte was glad of it, although she didn’t feel that she “needed someone with her” in the way that they sometimes spoke of grief-stricken widows. But she was exhausted, the children were fearful and moody, and Frances’ presence was a relief. They rarely spoke. But her calmness, and the simple way she set about the tasks of the day, were settling.
More dead, always more dead. James up the hill, Flynn down by the river. Two brothers of Green Pratt, lean and bearded, had shown up to retrieve his body. No one knew how they had learned where it was, but learn they did, arriving from Ironton in the late morning with a team of mules and a wagon with a hastily built coffin in the back, glumly refusing offers to eat a meal or spend the night. “Daddy will want to have him home,” one of them said. “He’ll want to sit up with him and then preach the funeral.”
“Your daddy is a preacher, then,” Charlotte said.
“Yes, ma’am. A preacher and a fighter. You ain’t never heard of Parson Pratt? He fit all up and down this part of the state, and Arkansas, too. All us boys fit, and only one didn’t come back.”
“Not counting Green, here,” the other one said.
Charlotte turned away. Any more talk of fighting and she would vomit. She’d preach them a funeral, all right, one about waste and loss and the price women paid when men couldn’t stop fighting. She’d draw her text from Ecclesiastes and preach about vanity.
As Charlotte walked toward the village, she heard the Pratt boys whistle to their mule team and head south toward French Mills. She didn’t look back.
Frances could manage the children, or they could manage themselves. She needed to walk.
She remembered when she had found an arrowhead in the cornfields in the predawn moonlight, years ago, and imagined to herself how enriching it was to live on ground that had been inhabited for centuries, the civilizations that had come and gone, the ancient lives beneath her feet. Now as she walked northward, Daybreak and the whole valley felt like a great graveyard, where it was impossible to set foot without treading on a corpse.
They had ferried Marie Mercadier—by unspoken compact, everyone had stopped calling her Marie Flynn—across the river to her father’s old house, where she had lain in bed for the past two days. She appeared to be coming around little by little, taking nourishment by spoonsful, though her eyes were unfocused and glassy. When Charlotte stopped by her door, she was propped up in a chair by the window, with Josephine behind her brushing her hair and Dathan sitting close by with a towel to wipe her face.
“How’s she doing today?” Charlotte asked quietly.
“Better,” Josephine said, in a voice that was too bright and loud. “She’s been trying to talk most of the morning. I’m real encouraged.” Marie’s eyes drifted toward the sound of Josephine’s voice.
“That’s good to hear,” Charlotte said. She wasn’t convinced, herself. Marie might come back to them, but the longer she stayed in this deadened state, fed by hand, soiling herself like a baby, the more Charlotte doubted it. Still, stranger things had happened.
That reminded her of something else. She touched Dathan’s forearm. “Those cattle across the river.”
“Yes, ma’am, I been thinking about them. We brought that little calf up to our milk cow, and they got along fine with a little encouragement. But all them others are still out there.”
“It’ll take quite the pile of firewood to burn those carcasses, but once we get them going, we need to finish them all the way. Perhaps you and a couple of the others could gather all the dry wood that’s over there, and any drift you find along the riverbank, too.”
Dathan nodded. “Don’t you wonder about it none, ma’am. We’ll figure it out.”
Marie leaned forward in her chair, her eyes rolling. Her lips smacked
together. Charlotte could see what Josephine had meant about her trying to speak.
“Buh … buh … buh … buh,” Marie said.
“Yes, Mama?” Josephine said. “It’s all right, don’t hurry.”
Charlotte stepped back, wondering if her presence had agitated her.
Marie’s expression grew more intent, a gathered frown that compressed her entire being into her eyes and lips.
“Buh … burn the house!” she exploded.
Charlotte and Dathan exchanged looks. Dathan leaned close to her. “You got it, Miss Marie,” he said. “That old house will have plenty of wood to burn up them cattle, once and for all. Won’t be nothing left but a scorch.”
Marie leaned back and her eyes lost their wildness. “Burn,” she repeated.
Charlotte opened the front door. “I’m going up to visit your father,” she said to Josephine. “Come along with me, why don’t you.”
The girl glanced at her mother, whose eyes were now closed with fatigue. “All right,” she said. “Mama’ll be sleeping for a while now.”
Charlotte took her hand and they walked up the valley past the Temple of Community. The neglect of the war years had taken its toll on the Temple. Its stonework, so carefully overseen by her father, had grown mold on the shady side, and the broken windows had gone unrepaired for so many years that the thin planks they had wedged into the frame to keep out the wind now seemed like part of the original design. More work to be done, by her or someone.
Turner’s words came back to her all of a sudden. “Stop working and sit with me. Hold my hand.”
How much she now wished she had done more of that—more sitting, more handholding, less force and fury. She had not been destined to be one of those happy helpmeets from Godey’s, she knew that—but a little more softness from time to time, what would that have hurt? All Turner’s flaws and failings were buried with him now, and she was left with recollections. That first moment in Leavenworth, when she had seen him speak. The grindings of life out here in the hills, their hopes and their failures. She had never imagined him dying and leaving her behind, even during the war. He was always going to come back, and they would reshape Daybreak, rebuild it to its imagined possibility, but the war had taken that away. Her old Turner had never come back, and the Turner that had returned was not that man, no matter how much they had wished for it. Perhaps she should have been easier on this new, broken Turner. Perhaps they should have chucked it all, headed west, rebuilt themselves instead of their dreamed-of community.
And as she walked to the cemetery, holding the hand of a child who was not her own, she felt for the first time that she was alone, utterly and entirely alone, with no one living to hold her hand and give her reassurance, only those who needed reassurance from her when she had none left to give. They all sought strength from her. But where could she go for strength of her own? Nowhere. And with her free hand she wiped her face, and it was wet with tears.
They reached the fresh mound.
“Your father was a good man,” she told Josephine. “I hope you remember him as such.”
Charlotte cast a glance up the hill at Adam Cabot’s grave. The bittersweet she had planted five years ago had vined its way into the small oaks at the edge of the forest. She could see the seed clusters forming on the underside of the vines, dull orange showing through the green covering, faintly hinting at the explosion of color to come in the fall.
Josephine said nothing. Always the observer, that one. How could a child have developed such an air of judgmental watching, at her age? Hard to fathom.
Charlotte went on. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that you’ll always have us. You’ll always have me, and the boys, and the people of Daybreak.”
“I don’t
want you,” Josephine said. “I want my mother.”
Charlotte let go of her hand, stung.
“There’s no need to be harsh, child,” she said.
“I’ll prefer harsh over false any day,” said Josephine.
Anger blurred Charlotte’s eyes but she didn’t speak. So these were the children of the new dispensation, the children of the war, tough-talking, as hard-shelled as a black walnut, closed off to the romantic ideals of her generation. Perhaps it was just as well.
“As would I,” she replied, and said no more.
As she stood with the child, gazing but not gazing at the graves before her, her eyes blurred and her mind in flux, Charlotte grew aware of another pair of eyes on her. A whitetail deer had come out of forest across the hollow from the graveyard and begun to graze at the shoots along the edge. Their voices had caught the deer’s attention, and now it had jerked its head up and was watching her, its ears spread wide, its nostrils open, its eyes protruding like knobs from the sides of its narrow head.
She didn’t know why, but for some reason she immediately thought of Caroline, her sister, dead now—what? Ten years? Eleven? Could it be that long? Apparently so. Perhaps it was the way the deer had lifted its head, swiftly but gracefully, that reminded her of a similar movement Caroline used to make; her habit of listening with her head slightly turned, favoring her better ear or maybe showing a prettier profile. Or perhaps it was the air of fragility that Caroline always possessed, despite her joie de vivre and coquettish ways. Caroline would be the one to die earliest, of course. She had weighed so lightly on the earth that it was easy for her to float off.
Charlotte gazed at the deer. The deer gazed back.
Or perhaps Adam Cabot’s spirit was in the deer, or James’s, newly flown. Crossing the bar of eternity had placed them both beyond the reach of talk, and fighting, and daily care, and despite the anguish of the last few days she felt herself beyond its reach as well. What was there left to fear after this?
No, it was not Adam, nor James. Over the years she had tried to conjure up Adam’s presence, here on the hillside, and if he had ever returned to her she would have known it. And James—any uncanny sensation would not come from sensing his presence, but from feeling an absence. How could she not know his presence? She had talked with him almost daily during his years away, in the privacy of her own mind, to the point that he was always with her in thoughts regardless of distance. If James wanted to communicate with her, he wouldn’t need to inhabit the body of a deer. He could simply speak to her inside her thoughts.
The Widow Turner. She was now the Widow Turner. This would take some getting used to. The Turner inside her mind, the one she had grown used to over the years, the one, she had to admit, whom she sometimes preferred to the actual Mr. Turner—would he fade and disappear? Would he stay, or would she be forced to make do with the lesser comfort of memory?
The deer’s eyes were immense and watery, and the thought flitted through Charlotte’s mind that if only she had brought a rifle with her she could have fed the colony for a week with this animal. As if sensing that thought, the deer shook its head slowly from side to side.
That action gave Charlotte an eerie feeling. She felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Was that deer really reading her thoughts? Impossible. But the longer it stood there, and the longer they locked eyes, the stranger she felt. It was as if the deer had come to tell her something. And a name came to her mind.
“Angus?” she said, tentative but loud enough to hear.
In an instant the deer bounded away, its white tail flying, and was out of sight before she had time to blink. The spell was broken.
* * * *
As it turned out, there were enough split rails from Michael Flynn’s prodigious fence-building labor to pile onto the carcasses of the cattle. The men spent a day heaping them over the bodies, camphor-soaked handkerchiefs pressed against their faces to counter the smell. Newton joined them after being repeatedly warned to watch for snakes in the shady underbrush. By the end of the day they were ready to burn. In the evening, Dathan stopped by the house to talk, standing in the yard under the maple tree.
“Ain’t looking for much wind tomorrow,” he told Charlotte. “That fire’s going to be hotter than the hinges of you-know-where, though.”
“That’s all right,” Charlotte said. “We’ve got a river running by. We’ll not run short of water to put out sparks.”
“I’m gonna need both your boys. Newton to scour for flare-ups, and Adam to stay at the landing and keep all the buckets full. It ain’t lack of water that concerns me, but lack of buckets to hold it and men to take it where it needs to go.”
Charlotte nodded. Adam seemed young to be joining in such an effort, but dipping water at the river crossing seemed safe enough.
They gazed into the darkness across the river.
“Wind’ll be from the west,” he said.
“That’s good.” The stench of the burning carcasses would be carried away.
There was more to say.
“We don’t have to burn that house if we don’t want to,” Dathan said.
“I know,” said Charlotte. She considered for a moment. “Do you want it?”
“No, ma’am! I wouldn’t live in that house. But somebody might.”
She shook her head. “Promises were made.” Dathan nodded in agreement. Charlotte realized that the direction of their gaze was not only to the Flynn house, and the site of their latest disasters, but also to the slave cemetery on their own side of the river, where Flynn now lay. “How many people are buried in that cemetery down there?” she asked.
“Ten that I know of, eleven now, I guess,” Dathan said.
“You have their names?”
“Oh, yes.”
“We should mark them.”
“That would be a fine thing,” he said. “Some of the old folks, I just know their first name, or their name and what we called them, like Stinkpot.”
“Stinkpot?”
Dathan chuckled. “Yes, ma’am. I was real small when Stinkpot died, but I remember him. Stinkpot was a field hand, name of James. To a boy, everyone looks old, but he was the oldest of the old. And I don’t know how to say this politely, but you didn’t want to work downwind from old Stinkpot.”
They shared a laugh, and for the first time in several days Charlotte felt better. So they were walking on the bones of the dead. Who wasn’t, all around the world? Perhaps her answer was not to flee the graveyards of the world, but to consecrate it somehow.
In the morning they started early, and within a couple of hours two plumes—one the bright ferocious flame of a burning house, all dry timbers, floorboards and shingles, and the other, fifty yards to the south, a thick, low-hanging, black boil of smoke from the burning cattle—rose above the forest. They had brought Marie out in the street to watch, loosely tied into her chair with a sheet so she wouldn’t slide out. Just before lunchtime the house collapsed. Marie let out a groan that Charlotte took to mean satisfaction, and the men scrambled with buckets of water as sparks flew fifty feet into the air and settled into the fields and woods.
By midafternoon it was done, although Newton and Dathan stayed across the river to patrol for flare-ups. The rest of them settled into the shade of the trees near the Temple with jugs of cold water from the springhouse.
“Charley, you’ve been a veritable ironclad through this whole mess,” Charlotte said as they relaxed on the grass. “I’m going to put you up for president of the Daybreak community in October.”
Charley smiled and looked away. “Mrs. Turner, you know I don’t have the brains for that.”
“You think I’m joking, but I’m not,” she said. “When I saw you ride out after Flynn, and then Dathan ride out after the both of you, I figured somebody would be bringing back somebody for burial. I just couldn’t figure out who and how many. We’re fortunate it turned out the way it did.”
She leaned closer and spoke in a low voice. “That man acr
oss the river has earned some estimation, too. I know this goes against your upbringing, but come next meeting, I’m going to nominate him for membership in the community. I’d appreciate your support.”
“What if I can’t give it?”
“Then I’d have to choose between you, and I’d hate for that to happen.”
Charley kicked at a clump of weeds and didn’t answer.
They all seemed to notice the stranger on the road across the river at the same time. He emerged from the screen of underbrush, reached the crossing, paused, then urged his horse forward. All conversation stopped.
“I heard tell that some of the old irregulars might be passing through here,” Charley said softly. “That might be the famous Frank James. I heard say he was a stocky sort.”
The man was wearing a gray slouch hat and a brown duckcloth duster that floated out behind him as he swum his horse across the river. He carried no visible weapon. His face was broad and he wore a thick Maltese beard that completely covered his mouth.
“Where’s your rifle, Charley?” Charlotte said.
“In my cabin.”
“All right. If he tries to push past me, knock him down.”
They stood up and walked in their separate directions, Charley toward his cabin and Charlotte out to the edge of the village. She stood in the sun and waited.
The man let his horse shake dry for a few seconds and then urged it toward the village, ignoring the drifting plumes of smoke from Flynn’s old place. When he reached Charlotte, he tipped his hat and drew up his horse, dripping water.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said. His accent was odd. Charlotte could not place it.
“Good afternoon.”
“Is this Daybreak ahead? I’m looking for Daybreak.”
“It is.” She did not move.
He looked toward it and squinted. “Good.” There was no sound but that of water dripping on dry ground.
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