A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  The three chestnuts stood deep in the woodlot near the ravine that the stream had carved throughout all of time, to its bedrock of stone, small pools, chutes, waterfalls, all starting in a small marsh farther east and flowing west and slowly downhill to where it ran into the Crooked Lake. The chestnuts also ancient, so much so that they had formed their own clearing in the smaller, younger growth of shagbarks, oaks, locust, cedars and pine. The chestnut trunks were a three-man span at chest height, great loopy roots worn smooth as kneecaps above ground, a high, dense canopy and the glade within large enough to shelter a horse and rider from a storm.

  Malcolm walked the direct route, skirting his corn and then crossing the meadow before entering the woods, and so stood watching, unexpected and hidden in the long dusk. Amos Wheeler had kindled a small cautious fire, for cheer, not heat. He’d gathered a considerable stack of deadwood across from the fire-ring of blackening stones. There was a crude lean-to constructed with the opening facing the fire, three feet high at the peak-pole that sloped back five feet, where it hit the ground. The sides snapped branches and brush laid up against the pole. Not much more than a hole to hide in, a burrow barely above ground. He had a tin pail of water with a dipper gourd tied to the handle at his feet and was smoking a cob pipe.

  “Don’t jump,” Malcolm said, as he stepped around the chestnut and into the fire-glow.

  “You think I didn’t hear you coming? Crashing around like you was a lickered bear.”

  “No doubt you’ve seen such a thing.”

  Amos Wheeler blew expert smoke rings toward the few uplifting sparks. “Mister, I seen more than you might think.” He sighed, a small roll of his shoulders. It struck Malcolm the boy was unaware of doing so, a natural wearied physical release or reaction. Amos went on. “You come to kick me out?”

  “You might’ve asked.”

  “It’s just a mite of firewood would rot anyway. But I’ll go, you want.”

  “You’re a hardworking boy. Could make a fine hand all around, one day.”

  “I earned my way since I was five years old. You tell me what I got to do, to earn this spot, I’ll take it on. Walk in when the first bird sings, split wood, help in the barn. Show me and I’ll do it.” He paused and said, “I’m awake anyway.”

  Malcolm took a stick from the pile and pushed the fire around, added the stick and then two more. “I expect you are.”

  “Then I can stay here?”

  Carefully, thinking he was being careful, Malcolm said, “It won’t be so long and the nights’ll get crisp.”

  Amos spat to the other side of the fire, lifted the dipper from the pail and drank. Water pilled on his chin and dropped. “I thought, we get a wet day or some other reason, you was to go to town I’d catch a ride. I seen them wool blankets they sell at Earley’s. And them checked shirts. I got a pair of them, I’d be good until snow fell.”

  “I see. Boots? Socks?”

  “Like I said, I’d be good until snow fell. There’s those lace-up boots felted inside. You seen them? I bet they’re some kind of warm. Time comes I needed such, maybe I’d have earned up enough.” For only the second time that evening he looked at Malcolm. “That’d be some nice.”

  “You go barefoot until hard winter, is what you’re telling me?”

  “You did the same you’d know it was a waste of shoe leather to do otherwise.”

  “I guess I would. But you want those boots you’ve glimpsed.”

  Amos shook his head and spit again. His pipe had gone cold and he lifted a splinter and stirred the bowl, then held the splinter down into the coals until it caught, brought it up and sucked new fire into his cob. He said, “I do.”

  Malcolm stood abruptly; the boy reared back on his stone and then steadied as Malcolm helped himself to the dipper. As he settled himself back on his tired haunches he looked up at the spark-trail reaching up until it winked out, leaving only the low heavy spread of the star field above the opening of the ancient trees.

  As if he were speaking to that opening, he said, “Does your father know where you are?”

  Amos leaned and set his pipe on the ground. Then rubbed his hands on his knees as he studied the fire, his face cut in planes of dark and red by the light, his eyes hidden, sloped away. Finally he said, “Mr. Hopeton. He run me off.”

  Malcolm sat a long moment, considering this. What sort of man would send a ten-year-old boy off to fend for himself? He started then, cautiously. “Was this before the peaches?”

  “No. That was all my doing.”

  “Was it after? As a result of being gone and unexplained?”

  “No. He thought it funny, cuffed my ears.”

  “So what happened?”

  Amos took another drink of water. Now it was his turn to tilt his head back to watch as the sparks swarmed. Eyes heavenward, he spoke. “Pap has a hand in a great big pile of things. He runs traps in the winter, pays boys to do the same. Pays a penny for what he can get a nickel for. Them boarding houses and railroad hotels, from Watkins to Geneva, Dresden to Dundee and up to Canandaigua, he keeps in geese and ducks, venison, coons and chucks, the year around. Time to time he has fresh beeves or pork. But he’s most a wizard with critters on the hoof. He’ll buy spavined horses or heifers that won’t take, why, not six months pass and they’re spry and ready for the bit or fresh with a first calf. Ma says he must have some gyp blood to him but he says all he knows is what he learned from his own pa. But that talk also rips him some; he’ll kick his own chair to flinders cros’t the room and stomp out the house. He gets that way, no chap wants to be in his way. Yes sir, there’s a scurry when he riles.”

  Amos punctuated this last by looking at Malcolm and touching two fingers to his brow in a salute. Then dug into his pocket for a pouch and went to work refilling his pipe, head bent over his task.

  “And you riled him?”

  “I’m here, ain’t I?”

  Malcolm waited.

  Amos bent and plucked a twig from the pile, held it in the fire until it caught, and lifted it to place the flame against his cob, sucked and blew smoke, sucked again.

  He tossed the twig into the fire and said, “I wouldn’t do the horse trick. He had it all set up and I said No. The last time I almost got caught and so I said No, he could do it hisself. Although he couldn’t and we both knew that. It lathered him right up. He’d made his money a dozen times over on that horse and once more, to boot. It was crowding up on us, folks was talking and he was lucky to sell that horse one more time. That was how I seen it, and I told him so. He took down the strop and set into me. I don’t know if it was me saying no or telling him why, but he was whaling away on my backside, had my head pinned between his knees. That’s when I seen the poker. I’ve had a smart bit of time to think on this and wonder if it was just a accident or Ma left it so.”

  “I see.”

  “I twisted my head enough so I caught a good mouthful of his leg and bit down like to tear it out. He hollered and pushed me off him cros’t the floor and I come up with that poker red hot at the tip, waving it toward him. He was bent, one hand clenching where I’d bit him. And that was when he commenced yelling at me to get out, to get out and not come back. The door was right behind me. I throwed that poker tip-first into the wood box where it could set the whole place afire in a heartbeat. He let out a whoop and dove toward it and I jerked up the latch and hightailed it outta there.”

  “And came back here.”

  “I did.”

  “What makes you think he won’t come after you?”

  “He won’t.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “When Pa says something, he don’t turn away from it. He said Go; I went. He’s got my brothers coming on, and other boys, his trappers and such, will do what he wants. He seen I wasn’t cut out for it, didn’t want it. That’s that.”

  “So that’s your story?”

  Amos reached a long, skinny, hard arm like a snake and dragged three pieces from the pile and tipped them onto the f
ire and used his foot to nudge them into place and said, “You wanted to know about the horse.”

  “Horse-doctoring is what you’re talking about.”

  “The only hard part was figuring out how long to wait once we got Pete back, and where to go next. Sometimes it would be five-six months, other times just a week. It was nose to the ground. Some fellers would holler loud and wide and cut out thirty miles in a circle around. Most times though it was the lay of the land. We sold Pete in Himrod, didn’t mean the folks down Chubb Hollow had heard a word; and so Lamoka was the next best place. A course, that was Pa’s job and he done that fine. He never jumped on a guess, it was all thought out. He stuck a wet finger to the wind, every day.”

  “I’m pressed to wonder, your pa is such a wizard, why’d he need you in the first place.”

  “I could slip in and blow the cone of powders up Pete’s nose easy as could be. So in the morning he was staggering and foaming. The feller would claim we’d sold him a bad horse; Pap would argue the horse was sound when the feller bought him and so it had to be wet oats or moldy hay that brought it on. Pap would end up buying Pete back for half what was paid. There’s not a farmer wants a horse with the founder or staggers. Most times the horse ups and dies. Now, Pete, he didn’t care for that cone of powders but he stood for it because he was my pet. Yes sir, I loved that fool horse. Enough so I ended up freeing him from all that mess. Last time he was sold, Pap made to send me in. And I wouldn’t go. Simple as that. So the man had hisself a sound horse and Pap had none.”

  “You know this is a bad business you’re speaking off?”

  “Pete’s happy with it,” Amos said. “But best I know, it’s what makes the world turn. From horseflesh up to judges and presidents and such.”

  “It could be argued, I suppose. Although plenty of folks live otherwise.”

  “I thought I told you. That’s why I’m here.”

  The crude shelter grew into a substantial lean-to shed within a few short years, tall enough for a sprouting boy to move about inside, with a wide bunk built into a wall, a stick-and-daub chimney above a rough stone hearth, a wide door on the front and chinked-log openings in the side walls for ventilation, or a breeze in the milder months. Summers Amos Wheeler slept outside beside his fire pit. Beyond his newly purchased garments, odd bits of cookware and tools accumulated: an ax, a crosscut saw, a froe and wooden wedges. Malcolm visited a few times those first years, with the growing sense that he was intruding, once coming upon the boy naked as a skinned squirrel, his creek-laundered clothing hung over branches and limbs to dry. There were times he’d disappear for a day, a night, several days in a row. Malcolm didn’t ask where he’d been and Amos Wheeler offered nothing, even if he’d missed work he’d been expected for; but those absences were brief and upon return Amos set at the job before him with grim ferocity, equal part trying to help catch up what had been missed on his account and fury at whatever had drawn him away. Malcolm assumed, despite the bold brash talk, there were family obligations Amos could not refuse.

  The winter after his grandfather died there were certain days when Malcolm walked to the high point in the yard to scan the woodlot horizon for a hint of movement, even if there was no work. But that winter Amos was gone much, there when they’d agreed beforehand but otherwise taken up with other things. Malcolm guessed he was trapping, or in some position of authority more active and lucrative than the slowed work of the farm. Once on a bitter January dawn, the sky a pewter plate with the least daub of red to the east, screels of snow over the rock-froze ground ahead of a northwest stinging breeze, Malcolm had stood overlong, gazing at the smudge of woodlot, hoping hard to see a curl of smoke, deciding he needed help to clear the buildup of manure from the swine pen. He dipped his head, a bead of cold snot fell from his nose, and the red smear of hopeful day shut down as the sky descended and it began to snow, stinging pellets driven by the wind. By nightfall there was a foot of snow on the open flats and high broad drifts in the lee of any building or fence or least sapling, leaving an altered land of shadows and ridges, dunes and drifts, hard crusts and hard going one place to another about the yard, the late sky suddenly clear, the starlight a dazzle that made the altered ground all the harder to read. When he fell on skim ice and his lantern went out, he didn’t try to light it once he made his way upright again, but went on for the barn. Two days later the wind at dawn had swung to the south and Amos came sloughing in on Iroquois snowshoes strapped to his feet, throwing up chunks of softened snow behind him, waving and laughing as he called out, “Hell of a snow, weren’t it? Hell of a snow!” They made butter from the stored milk through the morning, ate a big dinner, and by afternoon the mules were able to haul the sledge through the sinking drifts and got the butter to town, whooping in the warm sunlight as they plowed along. Though Amos disdained the mules, made no secret he preferred horses even as he grudged that the mules would do.

  In this way the young man and growing boy formed a team, pulling together most times, enough so Malcolm lost any doubts he might’ve held about Amos Wheeler. Those few occurrences when Amos failed him, he chalked up to the basic nature of their agreement. Mostly, and greatly, he was happy with the arrangement and Amos seemed to be also. Amos was quick and clever and paid attention. So when Malcolm Hopeton married, he thought of nothing except that he and his new wife had a solid hired man. It did not shine with promise, but outright beamed. More so because Amos was ever-more right where he needed to be, doing what needed doing, and then, not needed or wanted, gone like a blink.

  What more could a man ask for?

  He was almost thirty and about given up hope, when he met Bethany Schofield. Not for the first time in his life and certainly not for the last, meeting Bethany was a vast connection of so many moments, as if time were simply waiting for him to work himself out to certain correlations and then what came to pass spun elaborate webs backward, to show how exactly he’d arrived at each joining point along the way.

  At his grandfather’s funeral he’d been approached by a merchant of the town among the others offering condolences for a man they’d never known. But Harold Pinnieo had come with a different message. He’d heard of Hopeton’s peaches. If Hopeton was interested and had enough fruit to spare from his own use to make it worth their while, he would buy, for resale, all Hopeton could bring him. That following winter when Hopeton was in town he’d gone by the Italian’s store, which sold all manner of foodstuffs, from coffee beans to whole nutmegs, hard and soft cheeses, olives and a variety of peppers in brine, bottles of unfamiliar oils, dried egg noodles in fantastic shapes—none of which Malcolm Hopeton had the first idea how to use. He was a simple but efficient cook for himself. Still, the next summer he loaded careful baskets with his best peaches and drove to town one early morning. Pinnieo lifted peaches from half a dozen baskets and smiled, then nodded.

  “They’re good.”

  “I wouldn’t have brought em if they weren’t.”

  “Eight cents a pound?”

  “I measure by the bushel.”

  “I sell by the pound.”

  “Well, I don’t know by the pound. So take em and sell em and we’ll see how it pays out. How’s that?”

  “I’m a honest man.”

  “Never doubted it.”

  Two summers later she was there before the store on the boardwalk when he brought his peaches to town. An idling town girl, was what he thought, in her neat white dress with navy piping on the long, tight sleeves and edging the bodice top above her soft gray apron, high-button boots peeking, a frilled scullery cap failing to hold the bounty of thick dark curls where sunlight burrowed and refracted back, proliferated. Then she’d turned to him, eyes dark-shining, cheeks full and bright, her lips peeled open laughing and then swiftly serious, her voice caught back in her throat, as she said, “Oh. There you are. The peach man, finally come. I’ve been waiting for you. I think you want to meet me.”

  In his stunned moment he managed this: She was no town girl, not only a
farm girl, either, but some other creature altogether. What he’d been waiting for. Just like that.

  Seven

  It was a Wednesday morning that Enoch Stone met in chambers with Judge Ansel Gordon; in the afternoon they convened again, this time with the county prosecutor present as well.

  By Thursday word had spread from those paired meetings of a presumed substance, scattered details, lies and ugly rumors. Enough reached August Swartout to cause him a rough sleep-tossed night and the resolution to pay a visit come morning upon David and Iris Schofield. They weren’t close neighbors and he’d not known Bethany well but with Harlan under his roof, as well as his own particular turn of mind, he felt compelled to the undertaking. Fueled further by the news that Enoch Stone intended to address the subject at Sunday Meeting.

  Friday morning found August and Harlan in the buttery, August turning the barrel churn and listening to the splash grow heavier as the solids separated from the buttermilk, Harlan using paddles to spread the ready butter into the wooden trays. It was pleasant within the structure with the deep cooling wells, the high stone foundation holding the cool against the day; the same foundation that kept the winter freeze at bay, also the steady circulating water from the uphill well and the gravity-feed wooden pipe that ran year-round. The previous day all three had finished jarring the ripe cherries and the remainder of the early-season garden produce, although August had been preoccupied after his morning trip to the Four Corners. He had spoken briefly of the news of Enoch Stone and then with uncharacteristic sternness made clear he didn’t wish to discuss the issue further. An hour later Becca had burned the last batch of black raspberry preserve and Harlan had carried the kettle to scrape off best he could into the hog-trough, then returned to the house where Becca scalded and scoured the kettle. August had sat on the small front stoop, smoking and looking off at the drying world.

  Now he looked up from his work and said to Harlan, “I’ll be gone today. Most of it, anyway. I’m overdue paying a call upon David and Iris Schofield.”