She took an easy pace over the succession of ridges west, not wanting to tire the horse, and picked up the road between Ironton and Annapolis south of the sawmill. She knew he lived somewhere on the other side of the town, but figured she would ask directions once she passed through. To her surprise, a mile before she reached it, she spotted Gardner’s recognizable form loping in her direction. She stepped down from her horse, led it to a patch of grass near a rock outcrop where it could graze, sat on the rock and waited for him to arrive.
He looked at her in surprise and sat down beside her. “I was just coming to see you.”
“And I was coming to see you.”
“Not sure what it was, but a couple of hours ago I got an overwhelming urge to talk to you,” he said. “Not that I don’t always have that urge, but this morning it was particularly acute.”
“You must have sensed something,” she said, and told him of her encounter. She left out any mention of receiving his letter. Gardner listened carefully as she described the man and their conversation. He picked up a twig and twirled it between his thumb and fingers.
“So he said he was at the Haymarket?”
“Yes, and he mentioned the big railroad strike.”
“Knights of Labor man, then, most likely. Not the bomb-throwing type. I don’t think he poses a threat to you.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about, it’s the community. If this Pierce or whatever his name is starts organizing and uses our community as his base, word will get around. We’ve lived in peace with our neighbors for a long time.”
He gave her a sidelong smile. “Any neighbor you’re especially concerned about?”
Charlotte felt suddenly glad to have someone she could tell her worries to without fear of judgment. She leaned her head against his shoulder. “You know there is. If I were younger, I’d not hesitate about tangling with the company, but nowadays I’m not sure. We can’t even agree whether to do business with them.”
Gardner sighed. “That’s the advantage of being an old hermit,” he said. “I’m not required to agree with anybody.”
It calmed her to hear his sympathetic tone, even if nothing he said helped her think. On the ride out, she had gone over as many possibilities as she could think of, and all appeared to lead to trouble and strife.
“Want to hear a story?” he said.
“Sure. Happy or sad?”
“Little bit of both, I suppose, like most stories. When I was young, I had a little rabbit dog, and he was about the best dog you ever saw. He wouldn’t just flush the rabbits, he would chase ’em down and catch ’em, he was that fast. My dad always used to say, ‘That dog’s too eager. He’s gonna regret that one day.’ But I always liked him being that eager, even though it meant that he was the hunter and I was the retriever most of the time.
“Anyway, we were out one day, and old Ruffian scared up a rabbit. And off they went! Dashing and darting this way and that. Then all of a sudden he gave a big yip and came running back. Turns out he’d run right over the top of a copperhead, and it bit him on the cheek.”
“So your dad was right.”
“I guess he was. Dog’s head swelled up to the size of a pumpkin, and he laid under the house for three days. But you know what? He lived through it, and next time we went hunting he was out there running after rabbits like always.”
“So the moral of the story is that creatures always follow their nature. Or maybe that dogs just don’t have any common sense.”
“Oh, you want a moral. That’ll cost extra.”
They shared a laugh at that, while Charlotte considered the situation in Daybreak. Ultimately, it was not her decision whether the man stayed; Newton was president now, and he would probably give him a place to sleep until the next community meeting; lack of hospitality was not the Daybreak way. By then they would have a better idea of Reuben Pierce and his motives. She should stop worrying and let the processes they had lived by for all these decades do their work. The wisdom of the many is greater than the wisdom of one, as Travels to Daybreak put it.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden movement from Gardner, who stood up and faced north. “Well, here’s trouble,” he said.
She stood up and followed his gaze. A large man on a dark bay horse was coming down the road at a leisurely pace, like a parson on his way to Sunday dinner. She recognized him from somewhere but couldn’t place it.
“He’s seen you, so you might as well stay here,” Gardner said. “Otherwise, I’d send you on a ways.”
As the man drew closer into view, she remembered. The rough-looking fellow in the mine shack, the one who never sat down and didn’t accompany them. “Why would you send me away?”
“I’ve had some unpleasant dealings with this man,” he said. “Name’s Lon Yancey. Works for you-know-who.”
“I met him once. It would hardly seem fair of me to bring you my troubles, and then skedaddle off when yours appear.”
“I appreciate that. But yours are at a remove, and mine are immediate. But no matter. We’re here now.”
By this time Yancey had reached them. He stayed on his horse in the road, took off his slouch hat, and waved it at them.
“Ain’t this a sight,” he said. “Sorry if I interrupted your confabulation.”
“Just a chance meeting,” Gardner replied. “Mrs. Turner’s headed toward town, and I’m headed up your way.”
“It ain’t ‘my way’ exactly. I just stop there and get my jobs to do, and then go off whichever direction I need to. I’m headed down to Clearwater today.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, some kind of problem at the railhead. The payroll shipment didn’t come in on time, and some of the boys are sitting down.”
“I’d probably sit down, too, if I wasn’t getting paid.”
Yancey gave him a sardonic look. “I expect you would,” he said. “These boys’ll get paid. They just gotta have patience. Nobody believes in the virtue of patience anymore.”
“If you say so,” Gardner said. “You carrying the payroll?” There was a hard edge to his voice that Charlotte had never heard before.
“Oh, no, I don’t do that kind of thing,” said Yancey. “I’ll just reason with them. They can get all the credit they need at the company store, anyway. It’s not like we’re gonna let them starve. They’re reasonable, they’ll understand this. Except one or two, and I may have to throw them in the river.”
“So you’re the company tough.”
“I guess I am. My employer prefers persuasion to violence, but what they want more than anything is results. That’s what I provide, and they don’t much care how I do it.”
“Same old song around the world, Yancey. Just like Father Abraham said. ‘You toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’”
Yancey snorted. “I’ll have to take your word on that, old man. I was just a boy when they shot Old Abe.” He gave his horse’s reins a soft flip. “Anyway. I was going to stop by and see you on my way back, but you saved me the trip. We need your answer once and for all if you’re going to sell us your timber.”
“Once and for all,” Gardner said, his voice low. “Once and for all, I’d sooner spike every tree I own than sell them to you.”
“Aw, you don’t want to do that,” Yancey said. “Them trees is worth three or four years’ pay. But I’ll tell ’em you said no.” He chucked the horse forward. “Wish me luck on keeping this business down in Clearwater peaceful. Last time I was down there, I had to poke a fellow with my knife.” He paused, as if in reflection. “Ever see what a twelve-inch Bowie knife will do to a man, old-timer?”
Gardner stepped into the road. “Of course I have, you ninny. I was in the war. I’ve seen what a knife can do to a man, and a bayonet, and a musket ball. I have seen what you can do to a man with a load of grapeshot, and chain shot, and a simple cannonball. I’ve seen death and destruction to last ten lifetimes. Don’t think you can frighten me into selling my land with bold talk about a knife.”
/>
Yancey didn’t stop his horse. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said over his shoulder. He waved his hat to Charlotte then planted it on his head. “Safe travels, ma’am.” Then he kicked the horse into a trot and disappeared south.
Charlotte led her horse into the road and stood beside Gardner, watching him go. Gardner sighed. “Well, now I have this to deal with,” he said. “Not that I wouldn’t have had it anyway.”
“True,” Charlotte said. “At least now, you have the chance to think ahead. Otherwise, he would have shown up at your house unannounced.”
Gardner nodded, his lips pursed. “I imagine he still will. But I’ll know he’s coming.”
He looked up the road and then down, meditative. “Listen, I’m going to go home now. You should too. We’ve got things to take care of.”
Charlotte knew that to be true, and knew that her ride out here had been impulsive, maybe even foolish. Despite that knowledge, she didn’t want to leave, not quite yet.
But Gardner was already looking across the valley, his jaw working. “I’ll follow the railway line to town. Whenever the track crews replace a crosstie, they just toss the old spikes to the side, and I can pick up twenty or thirty along the way.” He returned his attention to Charlotte. “I’m sorry you were here to see this, Mrs. Turner. You’ve got troubles of your own. Don’t worry about me, I can manage this ruffian. It’s the company I’m concerned about.”
She smiled at him. “I’m not sorry. So you really plan to spike your trees?”
“Yes. I can fend off this man, but they’ll just send another. The only way they’ll leave me alone is if I have nothing of value to them.”
“But they’ll have no value to you as well.”
“Oh, that’s not true.” He regained a little of his insouciance. “The shade, the noise they make in the breeze, the acorns for my squirrels, the pine boughs for my bedding. Those are the things I value.”
“You use pine needles for your bedding?” She wrinkled her nose.
Gardner’s enormous laugh returned. She was glad to hear it after the earlier tension. “Just a few in my mattress to freshen the aroma. But I do have another bed, one made entirely of pine. I’ll have to show it to you one day, Mrs. Turner.”
Charlotte chose not to answer. “If you insist on dashing off, at least you can help me onto my horse. And I’m still thinking about your dog and his rabbits. I wish I owned a dog like that.”
“I do too. The dog I’ve got nowadays couldn’t catch a rabbit if it was tied to a stake.”
He half-bent down beside the horse and laced his fingers together to make a step for her. Charlotte rested her hands on his shoulders. But she didn’t place her foot into his hands, not quite yet.
“You can stop calling me ‘Mrs. Turner’ whenever you want to,” she said. She leaned toward his surprised face and kissed him. His lips were salty and a little sour, but she didn’t mind. She let the kiss linger for half a minute, then stepped into his entwined hands and vaulted into her saddle.
“How’s that for a moral to your story?” she said as she gathered the reins. “See you on Sunday.” Then she twitched the reins and trotted off the way she came, feeling a little giddy and entirely too pleased with herself. Yes, she had troubles of her own. But for the moment she felt perfectly unafraid of them, and she intended to make this moment last as long as she could.
Chapter 22
September 1888
“I need to remind you that this is all in the service of your personal development,” Lily Breeze said. “Attachment to persons is not what we are about.”
“I know that,” said Newton. They were naked in her bed, wrapped up under the covers, and he had murmured an endearment.
“I’m not sure you do,” she said. “We don’t engage the body for our own selfish reasons, we do it to advance our understanding. Brother Braswell wanted me to remind you of this.”
“You tell Braswell about everything that goes on between us?”
“Of course I do. He’s my spiritual leader.” She seemed about to say more but stopped herself. “Anyway, Brother says we should proceed from where we are.”
Newton didn’t speak. He’d never been able to overcome his misgivings about the entire relationship, but the ready availability of pleasure was so new and irresistible to him that he couldn’t keep himself away. She had never permitted him the full measure of her body, just the touch of her hand and the pressure of her lying full length. Until she was confident that he had sufficient self-control to engage with her without accidentally making a baby, she said, there would be no full measure. So was today the day?
“You’ve heard the expression ‘French whore,’ no doubt,” she said. “Ever wonder what it means?”
“Well, no.”
“Think about all those Bible kings with their hundreds of wives. If you wanted to stand out among a hundred wives, you’d need to learn some pretty fancy tricks. This secret knowledge was handed down through the years, woman to woman. When the Crusaders came to the Holy Land, they met up with women who possessed these secrets of the flesh and were enthralled by them. Back to Europe they went, with these secrets and some of the women. The Church hated this and tried to stamp it out, and you know why? Because they wanted women to be lumps of meat with a hole for procreation, not equal and active partners in the pleasures of the body. It’s not the sex they feared, it’s the equality.”
“Where’d you hear all this?”
“Brother B., of course. The man has read and studied all his life, more books than you and I will ever read.”
“I don’t know. Sounds like a fairy tale to me.”
“Maybe so. But I’ll tell you this. Shame is a woman’s great enemy. You talked about a whore in town you used to visit. Bet she never took off all her clothes, like you and I do.”
“No,” Newton said. “She was more of the ‘drop your pants and I’ll hike up my skirts’ sort.”
“That’s shame at work. The woman you marry, whenever you marry, probably won’t do it either.”
“What if the woman I marry turns out to be you?” He had meant it as a tease, but regretted it immediately. She’d already scolded him once for a bit of gallantry.
Lily Breeze laughed, but not unkindly. “Not in a hundred years. That is not the part I am to play. I’m a tool of your enlightenment, not a partner in romance.”
Newton didn’t answer, not wanting to admit his relief. Lily Breeze’s strange talk unnerved him. He figured it all to be mumbo-jumbo that she had heard from Braswell, but she repeated it with such conviction that he began to doubt himself.
“You don’t believe any of this, do you?” she said, as if reading his mind. “No matter. Experience is a better teacher than authority anyway. The point is, if women want to find true equality, they have to rid themselves of shame over natural functions.”
She climbed over him to the floor, taking the blanket with her to stay warm in the cool air. She draped it over her shoulders. “So lesson number one from the hidden secrets of the Bible, by way of the so-called French whores. Sit up.”
He did as he was told, swinging his legs out of bed and planting his feet on the floor. Lily Breeze pushed his knees apart and knelt between them. Then she gripped his root and dipped her head down like a bird drinking from a puddle.
Newton had never experienced such a thing nor even been aware of its existence. The railwaymen who passed through from St. Louis and Memphis sometimes hinted of exotic pleasures to be had in the city, but they never spoke in detail. The sensations were intense, and he felt a little lightheaded. He thought about the Crusaders, rough men in chain mail stepping into a silken-pillowed seraglio. Of course they would have been carried away by such feelings. Who wouldn’t? And then he could no longer think of Crusaders or railwaymen or anything at all, and then it was over. His body tensed and then released, trembling, and he gasped and lay back.
They hung there a moment, lost. Then she stood up abruptly and put on her underclothes.
He caressed her leg as she rolled up her stockings. “When can I see you again?”
She chuckled as she slipped her dress on and smoothed it down. “Interested in more lectures?”
“Something like that. Experience over authority.”
“So you were listening after all. That’s good.” She surveyed him where he lay. “When we meet again is up to Brother. He’ll send you a message. For now, think about what I told you. The idea is to return to the state of Adam and Eve. Not merely naked, but unaware of their nakedness.” She patted his bare belly. “You seem to be making progress on that front. Now get going. I’m sure you have work to do.” And she was out the door.
As he walked home, still shivering from the experience, he wondered if any of Lily Breeze’s story held up. All this talk of hidden knowledge, secret history. One thing was certain, at least. What she said about the power of an active woman rang true. Everyone always joked about married men becoming docile and obedient, but if he got that kind of treatment every day he’d be obedient too. Already all he could think about was returning for more.
His mind cleared when he reached Daybreak and saw a small, red-haired man, wrapped in an overcoat far too heavy for the weather, sitting on his doorstep with an expectant look.
“Hello,” Newton said.
The man sprang to his feet. “You Newton Turner?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God. Every old biddy in town has been by here three times to look me over. My name is Reuben Pierce. Your mother down the road says you’re the man to talk to around here.” He extended his hand.
“I don’t know about that,” Newton said, shaking his hand. “But come on inside.”
Pierce surveyed Newton’s bare front room as they sat in his chairs. “You’re a man who leads the simple life, I see.”
The Language of Trees Page 17