A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  Marion

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  One

  The boil of dust rose from the road still hidden below the curve where the land fell away toward the lake, hidden also by the green stand of Fulton’s cornfield between his own dooryard and the curve, but somehow he knew what was coming, could picture the flashy two-wheeled gig he’d not yet seen but had heard more of than he wished. He turned to where his younger hired man stood between the team of mules, holding each by the bridle, and the mules seemed to know what was coming also, both shifting foot to foot, the lines still looped around the near mule’s outside hame. They were setting out to make hay.

  Malcolm Hopeton spoke to the hired boy, Harlan Davis. “Get me something.”

  “What? Get you what?”

  He’d turned back, could hear the rattle of gravel under the wheels and the snapping trot of a fast horse and the gig came into view, leaping in the heat mirage of the road. Amos Wheeler in a slick suit, hatless, his hair the color of wet clay plastered back with the wind, reining up a blood-bay gelding. Beside him on the narrow seat, squeezed tight, one arm around Wheeler’s waist as an anchor against the day, sat Hopeton’s own wife. Until this moment he hadn’t laid eyes upon her in four years come September.

  Later he’d say he couldn’t remember what happened next, as if he were back in the worst of the war but in fact he recalled every moment of it. Much like the war itself.

  Bethany’s black mass of curls was pinned under an oversized hat but wild as ever, matching the glisten in her eye, her lips improbable as a small split plum barely traced with road dust. She called Malcolm’s name as Wheeler brought the gig to a stop in the yard. Wheeler wrapped the lines around the whip socket and young and unburdened by any hardships of the past years, came out of the gig with both feet in fancy patent boots and an outstretched hand. Grinning. Only the slip of fear in his eye. Malcolm had seen that countless times in all fashions but it always meant the same thing.

  “We done our best to hold things together, Mr. Hopeton.”

  “You sorry sum of a bitch.” Then he was moving fast to the pile of gear next to the empty waiting hay wagon, where he snatched up a neck-yoke evener and came back around swinging it, flailing right through Wheeler’s upraised arm and shattering his jaw and the side of his head and popping one eye from its socket.

  The mules broke free of Harlan, snorting and farting as they fled for the safety of the barn. Wheeler was dead on the ground, or nearly so, one leg kicking like a dying dog trying to right itself, one hand scrabbling against gravel. Hopeton stepped forward, straddled the man and lifted the evener. There was a cry from behind as Harlan tackled Hopeton, trying to get both arms around his chest, and even in the moment Hopeton knew the boy was trying to save Hopeton from himself. He had the evener in his strong left hand and so drove his right elbow back into the boy’s ribs, knocking the wind from him and causing him to stumble back. Hopeton followed and knocked the boy a tap the side of his head and laid him down in the yard. Harlan groaned twice and slipped into a semblance of sleep.

  “Oh my Lord in Christ, Malcolm, you’ve killed them dead,” Bethany cried, her voice trailing breath.

  She was down out of the gig, the horse tossing his head against the taut-wrapped reins. Someone had trained it well, most likely Amos Wheeler.

  “Bethany,” he said. “Oh Bet, you ruined yourself and done your best upon me as well.”

  Even wrapped in the white linen duster and sun hat, she was lovely as ever. Blooming cheeks made more so by the pallor welling over her. Her wide frighted eyes. For a moment he was dulled, the brackish taste back in his mouth, limbs heavy and he dropped the evener. Just so she brought out from under the duster a two-barreled derringer and pointed it at him, the bores alarmingly large in her small clenched hand. Then came the crack and a fire-sear and smack against his right ribcage, the scar tissue there hard as leather from when he’d been pinned against the already trodden bodies with a bayonet two and a half years earlier, his right thumb shot off moments before that. He threw himself upon her, his size and strength all within muscle memory of the countless ways toward survival as he caught her around her waist, pulled the gun from her hand even as he spun in a circle like a dervish, hurling her down near the haying gear, where she landed with a thump and snap as her head struck against the ground.

  Amos Wheeler was hitching his way toward the stack of gear, seeking a weapon of some sort. Hopeton jumped forward and snatched up a three-tined hay fork and stabbed Wheeler in the chest over and over until his palms burned from the sliding fork handle.

  He stopped. Cupped his hands over the end of the handle and leaned, breathing. The tines in the dirt. He looked over at Bethany.

  There was blood coming from her mouth and nose. The duster had come open, revealing a yellow dress with white lace trim over the tight bodice, high-button boots under the long skirts. How small her feet were. Her eyes were open, void, the long gaze of the dead he knew so well.

  Sometime during all this the fancy horse had bolted, running itself and the gig against the side of the hay wagon where both were tangled in the side slats.

  Hopeton looked up and down the road, to the curve, the one way where all this had come from, to the long flat stretching away in the slow swell of land toward the east where some few miles away it turned down toward the next lake. There was no one in sight. He expected no one. Everyone else would be out doing what he should have been. It could be evening before anyone happened along. He went to work with a heightened crisp efficiency. The task of the moment at hand.

  He wrapped the duster back around her, then lifted and carried her around the barn where he laid her on the grassy berm one side of the ramp that led into the upper reach of the barn, the ramp where he’d hoped to unload wagons late that afternoon. Back around to the front where he took Wheeler’s legs by the boots and hauled him to the same place but with no care or dignity in placement. He’d taken Wheeler on when he was still a boy, against better judgment and was thus rewarded.

  Finally he rolled Harlan Davis over. The boy was breathing but insensible. He carried him into the stable end of the barn and laid him upon a heap of barley straw yellow as sunlight. He went to the stone trough with its steady-dripping pipe from the rainwater cistern, took up the battered tin cup, dipped and drank, then refilled the cup and teased a small amount of water down the boy’s throat. A blue and purple clump the size of a walnut stood out from his head over his right ear where Malcolm had clouted him.

  Hopeton went back to the yard. He had no plan, as would later be claimed. He untangled the fancy horse from the wagon, led it to his own carriage shed where he stripped the horse out of the gig and harness and left them there, taking the horse to the stable, pulled the headstall off and tied it in a straight stall strung with cobwebs. He hung a bucket of water from a hook and attended to his mules, which were at work eating hay forked down just hours before through the trapdoor in the stable ceiling. With their bits in their mouths they were making a mess of it, long wet strands of half-chewed hay twined with ropey green strings of slobber hung from their lips. He left them at this while he pulled off their harnesses and hung them on pegs high on the wall, then took the Bart mule to the pen, pulled off the bridle, and shut the gate. He turned the Bill mule about and tied a loop of hemp ro
pe over his withers, bit-ring to bit-ring, to function as reins. He left him in the pen also and went to the house.

  He didn’t know to what purpose but still he went. It was much as he’d found it almost two months ago. The parlor furniture and what she called the dining room mahogany pedestal table and matching chairs gone. Much the same upstairs with only the old shuck and cotton mattresses remaining. The kitchen still held the large range, he’d guessed because either it was too cumbersome to move or as likely no one had the ready cash for such a luxury. The old pine drop-leaf table and ladder-back chairs he and his grandfather had carried into this country were in place. He got his purse with the slender sheaf of weathered bills from the drawer, put his town jacket on over his work shirt and lifted his summer straw from the peg. He left the house with no idea but to get Harlan Davis to Doctor Ogden in the town.

  In the stable he took down a sheepskin with the wool still on, outfitted with a rude girth strap and put it on Bill, wool side down, and cinched tight the girth, all the while talking to the mule in the way of a man to which such nonsense words of soothe were second nature. The mule had been ridden many times but that didn’t mean he liked it.

  Harlan seemed to be breathing easier, eyes still closed but for occasional fluttering lids. Hopeton prayed the boy would stay so for the five miles to town. After some thought he determined the best method was to hold the boy upright before him, fearful if he tried to strap the boy over the mule’s back neither mule nor boy would benefit.

  It took some doing, Bill backing and forthing as Hopeton got the nigh-deadweight of the boy slung legs down either side and leaned forward with his chest and face in the cropped roach of the mule’s mane, but finally it was done, as all things are with mules, knowing beyond a certain level of protest, the man will prevail. Off they went, Malcolm’s strong left arm holding Harlan upright tight against him, pressing with his thighs to keep the boy’s legs in place, his right hand holding the loop of rope. Once out on the road and turned toward town, Bill settled into an easy long stride.

  Harlan fell off the hay wagon and struck his head on a stone. Malcolm’s story for the doctor and any passersby met upon the road. Accidents happened all the time. And Malcolm Hopeton knew that any he might meet, known or unknown to him, would know the story of his disgrace, his scandal, his near-ruin, some perhaps in greater detail than even himself. He’d managed to rectify some but far from all since he’d walked up this same road in mid-May. But it did not occur to him that he’d moved beyond rectification of any sort or kind until he stood in the doctor’s office after delivering Harlan and the story and proffered bills from his purse—which Doctor Ogden refused, instead looking Hopeton up and down—and Hopeton briefly studied his own blood-smattered clothes not well hidden by the coat open to the summer heat.

  He remounted Bill and made his way through the backstreets of town to come out on a westward course where he cut crosslots and along smaller backroads toward Jerusalem, where Bethany and her kind had settled and lived, then northward into the wildlands of the Italy Hills. His destination not vague but precise. To hide.

  By late afternoon he was not as close as he’d expected, having made detour onto lesser lanes that wended more than the straighter, more traveled pikes, spooked early on by the stares and gapes of a passing buggy of women headed to town, again by a pair of boys set at gigging frogs in the creek running down the valley to the head of the west branch of the lake. Journeying toward the crossroads scant miles from the farm of David and Iris Schofield. His in-laws, and as such he would be recognized by any passing. Now he was up in the edges of the hills, moving slowly along little better than a path, seven or eight miles from his destination. The mule was lathered from the climb and the heat, the day grown sullen and dense, the bright high clouds of morning changed to a dull leaden sheet toward the northwest, faint rumbling thunder. His side ached where the bullet had nicked him, his missing thumb throbbed and a red scrim edged his vision. Twice he paused at small streams tumbling down through clefts in the woods to allow Bill to drink, sliding off to cup his own hands full as well. It was mostly rough woods here, a tangled mixture of oak and ash, wild cherry, black locust and scrawling nets of wild grapevine with main stems the thickness of a man’s forearm, then spongy marshland where the path threaded past beds of cattails, small ponds green with scum and dotted with beaver lodges and muskrat burrows. Deerflies swarmed his neck and the neck and ears of the quickly bilious mule. Hopeton swatted and crushed as he could, the mule assuming this to be only more offense directed its way. And so onward through the long high-summer evening.

  The storm came just as dusk fell and also as they came into an older, greater woods, the land more rough with upthrusts of ledge but a more visible path. Thunder and lightning snapped and crashed just above the crowns of the trees and water fell in lashing sheets. Wet dark shot through with slashing moments of green and purple illumination. Bill was restive, throwing his neck about and crow-hopping whatever direction suited him with the lightning, each time almost casting Hopeton off, the sheepskin grown greasy with the wet, the roached mane offering no handhold, nothing for purchase but to clamp his legs hard and stretch his hands as far down the rope reins as he could and haul back the mule’s head. Hopeton had spent many a night afield in storms with mule or horse teams, but hitched to heavy wagons mired in mud and slung out for miles with countless like teams and wagons ahead and behind. Such conditions made it more difficult though not impossible for a team to bolt, which was clearly Bill’s desire. Hopeton slipped off and led the mule, if the continuous struggle for forward motion could be termed such; nevertheless he kept his grip on the rope and together they weathered the storm. Nearly as sudden as it was upon them it passed off eastward, leaving only water splattering down as it drained from the trees.

  Hopeton turned and faced the mule, gripped hard where the reins met beneath his jaw, and said, “Now, you nutless, gutless wonder, we’re going to ride again.”

  Much later they passed through a patch of woods reeking of skunk cabbage and lit here and there with bits of foxfire. As another deluge began Bill came upon a steep bank so abruptly he had no choice but to slide down the wet clay and slippery broken shale, pitched back on his haunches, Hopeton rearing backward as well, losing his fine straw hat but otherwise as smooth a descent as either could hope for. At the bottom was a stream, rushing and churning from the rain. The smell of wood smoke hung low from the weather and on the far side, in an opening in the trees, stood a small dwelling with attached shed. The single window of four panes showed a timid flicker. He jabbed his boot heels over and again into the mule’s sides before Bill would tackle the stream, which was finally done with great thrashing and snorting. “As if you ain’t already wet,” Hopeton told him, sliding down for the final time that night.

  Bill allowed Hopeton to lead him partway into the shed, which held a deathly ripeness made more so from the damp, years of winter fur–stripped carcasses and stretched flensed pelts, the summer racks of smoked fish, big lake trouts, pike and pickerel brought up the trails out of the westward-lying Canandaigua Lake. Hopeton still had the rope in hand but had unknotted one side of the bit, intending to tie the mule in the shed, so when Bill threw his all into exiting rather than entering, the rope burned through Hopeton’s hand and the mule vanished into the night. He swore like a quartermaster, then made his way out of the shed and alongside the house, feeling the squared logs fitted tight. The window was the far side of the door and he’d not peek anyway. A man could get killed that way. He knocked once out of habit, then found the latchstring out, tugged it, and the door swung open. He stepped inside.

  The dwelling was a single low-ceilinged room with a fireplace of blackened stones, a crude table with two sawn rounds of logs for seats, two shelves of cooking and eating mess, a wide rope-slung bed covered with neat folds of layered blankets and bundles of nets and coiled lines hung on the far wall. On the seat between the fire and table sat a well-muscled man wearing deerskin trousers sm
eared with fish scales that appeared to dance as the firelight rose and fell, a finely napped black wool vest over his naked torso, his head shaved but for a tied-up topknot and long slender mustachios dangling either side of his mouth. He wore a beaten copper bracelet tight on one wrist and was mending a net draped in his lap with a spool of heavy waxed thread and a large needle. A coffeepot of blackened tin sat in the hearth, an empty but greasy spider over dying coals raked also onto the hearthstone.

  “Malcolm Hopeton.”

  “I’ve lost my mule,” he offered.

  “And trailed him here, this sort of night?”

  “Not as simple as that.”

  “Coffee?”

  “By god, yes.”

  The man made gesture toward the shelf where tin mugs stood. Hopeton helped himself, using a rag hung on a nail hammered between the fireplace stones to lift the hot coffeepot and pour. Steam rose up so sweet and sudden tears came to his eyes. The man remained intent on his repair until Hopeton settled on the upright log the other side of the table, hitching it a bit closer to the fire. He blew on the coffee, burned his mouth with a swallow and set the mug on the table. Only then did the man look up again.

  He was a woods-colt son of Gaiänt’wake, the Cornplanter, and a rumored Canadian woman known as Frances Goulet or Golt, both long since departed although Cornplanter, following the destruction of his people’s nation, had remained some years in a small hidden village to the south and west, becoming a farmer alongside women, when not engaged in debates of land policy in New York or Philadelphia, or theology with the Public Friend closer to home in Jerusalem. This one alone of his several sons made his own version of his father’s life, hermitlike in the woods. John Crow. If he had another name none in the white communities knew it.

  John Crow said, “I was out on the water this morning and there was high clouds burned away when sun came over the hills so I pulled my set lines and nets, good hauls anyways and got back to my camp at Rock Glen, set to gutting and cutting out those side-slabs, had my salting racks set and ready when a little wind come from somewhere behind me, from east of there and went out over the water, made a bit of frothy chop and come back to blow cold over me. Maybe nine of the clock.” He paused with eyes set on Hopeton.