A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  He rapped on the door. Waited and rapped again. Heard footsteps come close and pause.

  “What is it?”

  He’d anticipated the question. “It’s me.” With as much quiet certitude and familiarity as he could muster, soft enough to be heard and still indistinct.

  A long silence. He was about to speak again when the bolt was pulled and snapped, and the door opened. Not a slender gap but open wide. Alice Ann Labidee was wearing a yellow robe belted tight but showing the lace top of a nightgown. The robe was heavy, more suited to winter, though it showed her bare feet. Her honey-colored hair was loose upon her shoulders and her mouth was open in surprise. Her eyes the green of bottle glass.

  “I hate if I woke you, Alice Ann, but I needed to see you,” he said.

  She reached quickly as if to shut the door, then dropped her arm.

  She sucked her lower lip into her mouth, thinking, and revealing her upper front teeth. Her right canine jutted slightly, a slight signal toward him. Doing this allowed her to draw a deep and calming breath.

  She said, “I know you. You was at the farm. You’re Harold.”

  This error pained him more than he’d thought possible. He said, “I brought you up a bottle of beer. And Missus Pinckney thought you might want some coffee.”

  She made no effort to take either offering but said, “So Bertha sent you up. I figured someone was likely to track me down. Maybe best it was you.”

  She plucked up the tea can of sugared coffee and walked away toward the set of beds under the low angled roof, itself made of beadboard, and stood, sipping slowly. Harlan stepped all the way in and set the beer on a low table that otherwise held a potted fern as brown as it was green; and while she held herself in pause, savoring the coffee, her back to him, he surveyed the room.

  Besides the two beds strung with ropes and holding mounded feather mattresses there was a settee daybed pushed under the short wall under the eaves, a large chest of drawers overflowing, an pigeonhole desk also overflowing with papers, a slurry of smeared inks and scrawls. A portmanteau sat in a bare spot on the floor with both sides let down and heaped with clothing which he guessed belonged to Alice Ann. The room ran the length of the building, the flat ceiling a long, low narrow span and then tapering to elbows either side as roof became walls and joined the attic to the building below. The quarters of a woman who utilized all other space for paying guests, cold in winter and hot in summer; even as he stood in heat of day he heard nail heads lift in the cedar shingles from the roof.

  She turned back, glancing at him over her coffee before she shot her eyes away, gazing out a window. He thought, What in the world is she doing here? Maybe learning that was all there would be to this job.

  “It’s Harlan,” he said. “There’s no Harold to me.”

  “Harlan,” she turned, flagging her free hand in greeting or brushing away a fly. “No one ever showed up afore noon trying to tempt me with cheap beer. What do you want, Harlan? What’re you bothering me for?”

  He said, “I’m here on account of a good man, one you witnessed most of the best efforts to ruin.”

  She lifted the canister and sighted across the top at him, one eye squinting as if aiming a gun. “You’re talking about the husband of that slut who stole my Amos?”

  “Whatever stealing was done, was Amos’s doing. He was the one who deceived Mr. Hopeton every way he could think to.” He paused and said, “Seems he deceived you, too.”

  “Amos Wheeler would kiss you like it was the last kiss on earth at the same time he was picking your pocket.” She eyed him carefully as she said this. “I believe you know something like that about him, yourself.”

  He nodded but looked away, then back upon her. She lifted the coffee and drank as she considered him. Then she crossed the room and set the tea canister on the platter and prized the cork from the beer and settled on the settee.

  She said, “Come and set, Harlan.”

  “I’m fine right here.”

  “No,” she said. “You came to see me because you want something. It’s a funny place to be in. Now come set. Come over here.”

  He crossed the floor and eased down on the settee, a few inches from the end but otherwise as far from her as possible. She pursed her mouth as if swallowing something distasteful and said, “Tell me what you want. Don’t think for a minute I’ll be of any help, but I’ll listen, you made all this effort.”

  Brief as he could, thinking less was better and keeping in mind the notion of keeping her curious, he told her of Malcolm Hopeton’s situation. When he finished she held her silence and so he went on a bit, adding, as cautiously as he could, “What you said earlier about Amos picking your pocket: There’s truth to that and then some. What you didn’t say was he’d be looking at you as he done all those things and the look in his eye was enough to keep you from saying a word, isn’t that so?”

  She remained silent, but her face had gone thoughtful and she eased back, drank off a good part of the beer and gazed off. Finally she spoke.

  “You’re asking me to come into court and testify against Amos? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “It might not come to that. It might be enough if the lawyers, the judge, knew you were willing to do so.” He doubted this but also knew he had no idea what he was speaking about.

  Alice Ann went on. “I can’t do that. None of those men, not a one of em, would believe me. They’d think they already know the sort of woman I am, even if they’re dead wrong. There ain’t a soul alive knows me, anymore. I never thought it would go so bad when Amos come back; I thought it was the last chance for him to see the wrong of his ways. But that don’t change what happened and never can.”

  Harlan took pause. He shifted slightly, pushing back into the corner of the daybed and turning his knees toward her, making a greater wedge of space between them. He said, “You knew they was coming in that day?”

  She stood off the daybed with a forward hitch. Walked down the room as she said, “Lord, that coffee woke me right up, atop the shock of you banging on my door first thing.” She turned and said, “Let’s say I had a inkling.”

  He took the opportunity to stand. Last thing he wanted was to be sitting on the daybed with her again. Since coming up the stairs he’d felt off-kilter, as if he could not keep up with her. She sent his mind darting one way one moment, another the next.

  He said, “Are you saying he was keeping in touch with you? Letters? Or telegraphs sent here? After he ran off with Bethany Hopeton when they got word Malcolm Hopeton was on his way home?”

  A snorted laugh broke from her and she choked it back, her face turning serious. She said, “No, no. Nothing of the kind. I never heard a word from Amos those last months.” She glanced off toward the low western windows in thought and said, “Pity your Mr. Hopeton didn’t take the time to walk down to the woods and talk with me once he got back.” Then swung her eyes back to Harlan. “Not that it would’ve done a bit of good. I couldn’t help him, any more than I could help myself. And that’s your answer: I wasn’t no use to him then and I’m not any now. It’s all done.”

  “But you as much as said you knew Amos was coming in that day it all went wrong. Isn’t that so?”

  “I never said such a thing. And not a living soul can prove I did. I think you need to get along, Harlan.”

  “You’re not making sense to me. Not one bit.”

  “You don’t know a thing about women, do you?”

  “What I seen so far is a mystery I’m not sure I want to study further.” He moved toward her, toward the door. “I got to get on; there’s a afternoon of work ahead of me.”

  She stepped close of a sudden, her breath sweet of coffee, sour of beer. “I’m half of a mind to show you the reasons you’ll want to study that mystery—why you’ll be up to it all your life long.” She reached and pressed a finger into his skin below his throat and he felt his trousers jump. As if she knew this, she took her finger away and said, “But we’re both better off if you
just go on along.”

  His face was hot as sunburn. “I’m sorry to bother you. Maybe we should just forget I was ever here.”

  She studied him a long beat and said, “I don’t think either one of us could forget it if we wanted, could we, Harlan?” Then she lifted her hand and pushed her loose hair from her face. “Get out of here,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  He went down the stairs and paused behind the first-floor door, heard nothing and let himself out quiet as he could and then walked down the main hall, past the dining room filled with people eating and on out the front and down the steps to where Bart waited at the rail under the butternut tree. He mounted up and remade his way down to the Outlet and paused there just past the eastern landing where the canal-side was almost at bank level, letting Bart drink and sliding off to kneel just upstream from the mule and cup water one-handed to drink himself. Not letting go of the rope reins. He knew his mule. Then remounted and turned west.

  The sun was just past noon and it was very hot. He’d trotted and even loped much of the morning’s journey; but while he knew the mule was rugged, he also knew mules remembered ill treatment, and so settled into the long ride back to Jerusalem at a walking pace. Any guilt he felt about missing work was overshadowed by his care of the mule, his knowledge that August was also out making what could be a lengthy and difficult call, and, finally, the chance to absorb and consider all that had passed thus far this day. So boy and mule wended their way along, twice pulling off the towpath into the brush to let teams hauling barges make their way along the path. One barge-master smiled and waved, the other scowled and shook a fist in the air as if Harlan was someway impeding passage.

  He went on. As he did he realized he was flustered by Alice Ann Labidee and wondered had she intended him to be so affected. And concluded that while she might not be of use in his quest, she’d not ruled that out altogether. The mule sawed the air against a plague of deerflies and Harlan thought, If she was so afraid of someone chasing her down, then why had she remained so close? And then guessed he was reading too much into her poor hiding place; she might simply not have the means to get farther away. All in all, a parcel of thought not to be pressed for a conclusion. His head felt to be swarmed much as the deerflies upon Bart and sweat dripped into his eyes and burned, and he wished he’d thought to wear his hat and went along, studying the flowing water beside him and thinking of stopping and stripping down and cooling off but did not.

  He came into the town and stuck to the back side of the Burkett brothers’ mill that adjoined low ground along the canal and he paused there, studying the huge mill and the sprawl of sheds that stretched around, all attached, one way or another. The mill was a three-story mass of yellow brick that held steam-powered grinding wheels as well as vast storage vaults for oats, wheat, barley, buckwheat. Dried shell and seed corn. Farmers brought their grains here to be sold, processed and shipped east or south. Or milled on shares and returned to them for livestock feed through the winter. And the steam-power plant that drew in water from the lake also sent power to the lathes and riveters of the buggy-works that filled one of the adjoining sheds and to the tannery close down by the canal where green hides were cured and shipped or trundled by carts to be made into harness or shoe leather in another of the sheds.

  Not a month earlier Harlan had sat in the wagon bed when Hopeton had gone to town to buy seed corn from the Burketts, there being none in the web- and dust-strewn empty granaries of Hopeton’s own loft. And Malcolm Hopeton had left Harlan waiting while he went inside to conduct his business, then came out pushing a dolly with the sacks of seed corn, heaved them down into the bed of the wagon from the high dock, settled himself, and turned the team toward home. Malcolm told Harlan the Burkett brothers had first been lucky by securing the location for their mill, though it had been their father who’d done that, and the canals had come and they had begun to make money and then the railroads made them rich. But, he’d said, looking straight ahead as they rode up the grade out of town, it was the war that had made the Burketts wealthy.

  He’d said it as if stating a simple fact of day: My, it’s warm. That mule look a bit gimpy his near front hoof to you? A stone lodged. I reckon we should check. Those fellows made a bundle and a bundle again. Not a trace of irony or bitterness, only a comment upon human affairs.

  Up there in Milo there was uncut hay gone to seed and grown tough. Young corn with dusty leaves and weeds coming up, no one to run a cultivator through it—although there was no cultivator in the shed anymore. Not even a man and a boy to arm themselves with hoes and go out and do that work until their fingers and palms scraped off the callouses there and so raised new blisters, which would break and wither down to raw skin, smearing blood onto the handles of the hoes.

  Boy and mule slowly plodded through those lower reaches and then the back side of the town until he was finally out on open ground again, the waters of the east branch of the Crooked Lake falling away to the south, the Bluff that split the branches rising and shimmering in the heat of mid-afternoon. A couple, maybe three more hours and he would be back in Jerusalem with August Swartout and his own sister, Becca.

  Behind him, underground in a cell in the town, was the man he not only owed loyalty to but the only man on earth that needed him. That truly needed him. He pushed the mule on almost to a trot, a long extended stride of a walk.

  Eight

  August drove out in the jog-cart intent on the four miles uphill into the rougher land atop the ridge at the south end of the Italy Hill wilderness. Sunlight falling through the trees, dew drying off the roadside grasses and flowers. Brown thrashers, cowbirds, meadowlarks and bobolinks rising up chattering and chiding his passage. The horse prancing a side-stepping trot in a morning frisk, the iron bands around the wide wheels crunching the packed roadway, small scrapes of higher pitch as they rolled over rough gravel, not yet kicking up dust but the dark clots tossed by churning hooves.

  He soon turned uphill on a lesser track, the horse still jogging but working now, moving through fields and woodlots, making for the top of the long north-south–running ridge that separated the watersheds of the Crooked Lake to the east and Canandaigua Lake westward, up here a rougher, less fertile land, still south of the Italy Hills but running out of Jerusalem. The farms were smaller, with fields of corn but lesser cereals, small plots only of oats and hard rye, pastures dotted with rock outcrops half-protruding like vertebrae of ancient giant beasts, scraggly pines or a clump of hickories making shade for the herds of mixed cattle. Larger woodlots lay between the farms and swamps ringed with cattails and coated with green slime. A wood-duck drake broke from a drowned tree, a wild flare of color in the morning sun.

  There were members of his community he knew less well than the Schofields, but not many. David raised hogs, turkeys and chickens for the local markets and spent his winters in the woods cutting cordwood to sell to village residents or those without woodlots of their own. He was a man of hard, wiry build with thin sandy hair and a ruddy chapped complexion year-round. August had difficulty conjuring an image of Iris; and, for that matter, his memory of Bethany was of a younger girl. During the time she was grown and meeting Malcolm Hopeton and then marrying him, August had been building his house and settling into his small known world of Narcissa. He recalled only a girl with a mass of dark curls and bright blue eyes, quick to blush.

  He smelled the hog lots before the farm came into view around a curve of road and down a small hill. The place struck him as hard-used and sad, the house of unpainted clapboards darkening toward the color of light molasses, the barns low and with uneven ridgelines. The yard before the house was packed earth with only a sparse flower garden of hollyhocks and dahlias either side of the small front porch offering some attempt at brightness. Several dozen mixed red or black-and-white hens worked the edges of the yard or lay dusting themselves.

  He slowed the horse to a walk to allow the hens to scatter and also to announce his arrival as he saw a woman sitting in the
shade of the porch, working from a basket beside her to shell peas into a wooden bowl on her lap.

  His own peas had been done a month now. It was colder here, spring slower to come and the soil less willing to give. Even with the rich hog and poultry manure.

  He drew up by the wooden post and as he stepped down to tie his horse to the ring the woman spoke.

  “August Swartout. Of all souls to grace my yard and day. Shall I be cheered or is it ill news you bring me? Ill news has been too plentiful of late but we can’t pick our days, can we?”

  He smiled, not from her words but the tone of delivery and also the woman herself; once before her, he wondered how he could’ve forgotten her so easily. A bright face with the same curls her daughter had carried but these a salt-and-pepper spray pressed forth from a simple day cap, her form not plump but not wizened and dried as he might’ve imagined or expected. Most striking was the uplift in her voice, almost a singing clarity and while not jovial still lacking in grief or the presumption she was to be an object of pity. Perhaps stalwart also against such expectations carried toward her. He said, “I carry no news but only goodwill and cheer.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Pleasantries. It’s few that can look such a mother in the eye. Or is it David you’re after?” Now within the pitch of her voice he heard the jittery anger hidden in her greeting. He stepped onto the porch and took the empty chair that had the rush seat broken and mended with heavy twine. He leaned forward slightly with his hands on his knees.

  “Iris,” he said. “Nobody but those who were there know the circumstances and I have only sympathy for Bethany, no judgment. The Kingdom of the Lord is hers now, and that alone is all we know.”

  She blinked, her eyes lit bright but if with held-back tears, anger or some other condition of her mind he could not say. She said, “Surely she’s with Christ now, but I fear the devil walks upon the earth striving to snatch her soul back. Could be he was always after her. David’s about somewhere. I’d guess you came to see him, as the others have. But just where I don’t know. He walks out of the house at first light and spends his days as he can. This time of the morning he’s likely candling and crating his eggs. Or he could be rambling in the woods. I don’t know his mind anymore and wonder if I ever did.”