A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  Malcolm had taken great care about the day. His shuck mattress on the cherrywood sleigh bed had been replaced with a new one stuffed with steamed and dried goose feathers plucked from the breasts of geese—or so the placard promised. Beyond that, he’d noted a remark of hers made in passing one day in July when they’ d met in town and spent the afternoon strolling the shops and emporiums before dining at the Lakewood Hotel and attending a performance at the modest opera house by a traveling troupe of theatrical performers. In the small section of Brigg’s Home Furnishings devoted to kitchens, she’d paused before an iron range made to stand before the existing home hearth, the stovepiping shown to be easily entered into the chimney above the hearth.

  She’d only said, “The advertisement in Godey’s Lady’s Book claims these end the drudgery of squatting before a hearth to turn out burnt bread. Really now—I’ve baked good loaves all my life from the hearth oven. How we’re teased to an easier life, as if such is better. Now, look here, a tool that makes sense: It shaves nutmegs by turning the handle, the same as a grinder renders peppercorns to flakes. How many times have I sliced my finger trying to scrape a few twists of nutmeg to flavor an apple pie?

  He’d returned to Brigg’s twice over the next few weeks. The first time to learn how such stoves worked, then going home and making careful measurements of his hearth and chimney. The second time he placed an order through to the manufacturer in Oswego. Her stove would have double ovens, a vast cooking surface, twin fireboxes either side for greater or lesser heat as needed, a water tank attached to the back with a spigot on the front for hot water, and a raised shelf above for keeping foods warm. What had been a plain iron box also gained ornamental scrollwork on the legs and sides, even medallions of ornate roses centered on the oven doors. It was a grand device almost beyond his imagination but then he was in love.

  The range arrived by rail at the Dresden station, in a heavy crate of green lumber, disassembled, the parts all wrapped in felted wool and packed in sawdust. He met the train with Amos Wheeler and together they wrestled the crate into the bed of the democrat wagon. It barely fit, after much heaving and scraping and the mules broke a hard sweat hauling it home, where it sat in a corner of the barn loft until one evening Malcolm unpacked the pieces and laid them out and studied the smudged diagram. After a time of moving pieces here and there and back again it began to form a picture in his mind.

  He wheelbarrowed it all to the kitchen the evening in September the week before his marriage, knowing she’d not see it until after the simple ceremony they’d agreed upon. That day he and Amos had got in the last of his scant but rich third cutting of hay and the day fell swiftly toward night, summer rolling up, the dense golden light spreading over the land as the night gathered, puffed cool, a shudder of coming cold. Maybe a light frost by daybreak.

  Amos asked, “You want a hand with that?”

  “I got it. You go on. Enjoy your night. That girl still hanging around?”

  “What girl?”

  “That’s right. I never laid eyes on her.”

  “Then what makes you think there’s a girl?”

  “It’s a fair palace you’ve built in my woods. Get on, Amos. I got a bit of work ahead of me. And I’d do it alone.”

  “No need to be grumpy.”

  Malcolm heaved up and looked the young man in the eye and said, “Things are changing, here. For the best. You get used to it.”

  “You say.”

  “I do. And don’t forget it.”

  “No sir. I won’t.”

  Over the course of the summer he’d become familiar with what appeared to be her three sets of clothing. He presumed a couple of rougher skirts and shirtwaists and such that she wore at home. At the courthouse there’d been a small grip passed from Merry Struther up into the buggy, which Bethany had tucked wordless between her feet. Well before that day, he’d thought to himself, She’s a farm wife but I’ll dress her better than she’s had, she deserves such. Two weeks before the ceremony at the courthouse he’d come from the fields late for his cold noon dinner to find a cedar chest upon his porch, recalled then the trail of dust upon the road glimpsed midmorning. Someone had taken pains to avoid him and he easily guessed who that might be once he laid eyes upon the chest. Opened, he glimpsed stacks of crisp bed-linens and a folded snowflake quilt. Atop all were a pair of silver candlesticks wrapped in flannel and another flannel packet holding six silver teaspoons. He closed the lid, heard the solid thump of good cedar and moved the chest into his dining room. Her dowry chest. His own chest thumped a frantic tender heart for her.

  So then, both wet from the rain, the damp grip dropped just inside the door, she’d halted, drawn up by the bulk of the stove in a room she thought she knew. She walked about it, touching it here and there as if touching a strange beast suddenly loomed but before this day only heard rumors of.

  She looked at him and said, “My goodness.” Then her hand flew to cover her mouth, her eyes wide. She said, “Land sakes, Malcolm, I’ve already failed you.”

  Mildly he said, “How so?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start, cooking upon such a thing. And worse, I gave no thought to a proper meal to celebrate this day.”

  “Rest easy, Bethany. With the rain it’s enough today to kindle a fire for a bit of warmth and I can show you how the thing works.”

  He stepped and kissed her, wanting to lift and carry her up the stairs to the new mattress and find again that moment three months past beside his pond. She met his kiss fully, and hungry for it but only with her mouth, her body a slip of distance away. He ran his hands through her hair and buried his nose there and felt her relax, though she came no closer.

  He spoke into her hair. “I failed also. I had no thought for a grand feast, that sort of celebration. All I wanted was to reach this day and all that will come after. But Bethany, we’re not as alone as we might think. Yesterday afternoon as I was trying to heat pressing irons on the stovetop to smooth wrinkles from my shirt and coat, fearing I’d scorch em, yelling at my hired man to tend to the chores, someone drove up and hailed me. I was befuddled with the irons and stepped out the door with ill humor only to find Harold Pinnieo. So in the cool of my buttery waits an array of food and more. A bottle of wine all the way from Italy. Much else also but including, I’m sure, stinking cheeses and strange sea creatures.”

  As he finished he stepped back so she had no choice but to look up at him. Over her tremble her face broke light and bright, a twisted smile that turned down again, furrows plowing her brow.

  “It’s a terrible distress,” she said. “You’re so kind, so thoughtful. And what do I bring you? Nothing.”

  Gentle and simple he said, “You bring me everything.”

  Ten

  August’s back porch looked out upon the orchard pasture, also the vegetable gardens, but between those gardens and the base of the porch were flower gardens. Some few plants had long been there—blue iris in the spring, tiger lilies, daisies. Narcissa had added more—forsythia to bloom early, lily of the valley, poppies, a handful of precious Dutch tulips, peonies and hollyhocks in a mass against the south-facing side of the vegetable garden fence. A purple lilac marked the western edge of the porch, large and old, twisted stems thick as a man’s upper arm, lofting outward to cast a spot of welcome shade, heavy with scent-drenched blossoms the end of May. A pleasant boundary between porch and vegetables, a spot of ever-changing color spring through fall that demanded little upkeep beyond a morning or afternoon and in November stripping out died-back growth, or, missing that, the same work could be done the next March.

  In the newer section of the garden stood a stone plinth protruding some three feet above the ground with irregular sides blotched with orange, yellow and pale green lichen and near the top a rusted rod extended from the stone, ending in an eye that held an iron ring. A post to tie a horse up to, once upon a time.

  Once upon a time it stood before a different house, though built upon the same spot, the house
sited so this was the front and not back yard. Becca Davis had almost no memory of that house, where she’d been born and four years later her brother, and where her father had died months after Harlan was born. She remembered eating hasty pudding with the single kitchen window layered either in frost or drifts outside, while small ridges of snow formed along the cold floorboards from cracks of the ill-fitting door. She remembered the black smoke fighting the small flame from the tallow candle alone on the table. She didn’t remember anyone else in the room, although there must certainly have been. The pudding was steaming in her bowl; she remembered eating quickly as the pudding cooled, the spoon handle large in her hand.

  She did not remember the night her father died but only her mother’s story of how she’d left the house in the wet autumn night to walk to the closest neighbor for help, holding her infant son wrapped against her breast, leaving the little girl sleeping and unknowing all of life had just changed. It was only after returning to work for August Swartout did she realize that the neighbor had been August’s father, and a boy in his young teens had come back to the house to carry the little girl out of the house, or of her father’s burial, the quiet ceremony marking his passing out of Time. Her memories of these events and her mother’s subsequent retellings, the images these conjured, had commingled over the years so she no longer knew what was memory and what imagined and did not care: They all were real as the day before her.

  She’d never once made reference to that lost world once she was employed by August: There was no reason, all of that was gone and she was grateful for the job. He’d never mentioned it, either. He’d had his own dreams built and lost here, new ones formed—or at least he persevered. And she, in her lesser but vital way alongside him. She expected nothing more but, in the moments she thought about it, only prayed it might continue.

  It had been a quiet few days since Harlan had returned although Monday afternoon Enoch Stone arrived and held a brief conference with August in the barn before driving out again in his fast buggy. August sat tight-lipped at meals, speaking mostly to her brother about the work ahead of them. Though never failing to offer compliments, to thank her for the food. Then he’d press back his chair and stand, Harlan following him. Even at supper, late in these days of long work, at best he’d rise and pluck one of his black-wrapped small cigars, strike a match and walk out to look over his barns, his livestock, to be alone. When he came in it would often be by the back porch that led to the back stairs and up quiet to his bed.

  This morning she was wringing washing and spreading it to drape on the garden fence to dry. With herself and Harlan now at the house she no longer washed linens on the same day as clothing: It all added up to too much for a single morning or she hadn’t got the hang of it yet. Time would tell about that. She knew most women washed everything once a week and maybe she’d gain that knack or not; most women also baked once a week and Becca turned out new loaves every couple of days, always had and saw no reason to quit that just because there was one more hungry man able to eat half a loaf, a round of butter with his dinner, then a wedge of pie with his supper. It was summer, easy to launder twice a week for those extra linens for now. Come winter, if all remained the same, she’d face that. And gladly, she thought.

  She walked back and forth between the basket of heaped wet-wrung clothes and the garden fence, her skirts damp from the work, her arms pleasantly sore as she shook free the wrinkles, then draped the garments upon the fence. It was a job she could just about do in her sleep and so her eyes drifted, watching the honeybees among the flowers, following their trails off best she could, knowing they were headed for the woods along the gorge and so intent on direction: flying northeast or northwest? So she might suggest to August where to look for the bee tree come late October. When her eyes fell upon the old stone hitching post.

  Came a day long ago over her mind: The stone post loomed above to one side of her, overhead a sky of fleet spring clouds moving fast, the sky aching blue between the white, she on her back with legs and arms kicking up, a blanket the gray softness of a dove’s breast spreading out to meet the high deep-green grass spotted with the suns of dandelions, the lilac within her sight, dripping with heavy blossoms, the dense scent over her and somewhere, she could not see but knew, her mother was close by. Or even her father, that man lost out of Time, not even his voice or the sense of his hands but no reason to think it was not him, there, then on that day when her forgotten self lay in this same yard but an altogether other yard also. This a memory surfaced like a fish from deep water, never before glimpsed and she knew it was true, not some union of memory and her mother’s telling. The lost world suddenly drawn close upon her and the pang in her breast greater than she’d ever felt, or perhaps only once upon a time.

  She glanced about the yard quickly, laid down the snapped-free blouse upon the fence and darted among the flowers, crouched and looked upon the back porch, then closed her eyes tight, willing that other older house to appear in her mind, her hand upon the post for balance, a talisman, calling in what it also once witnessed. Behind her clamped lids passed bands of red upon the black field, also freckles of pin-bright light. But nothing more. Nothing at all. She ran her hand upon the stone to no avail. No surging image, no pathway stamped in the dirt of the yard to lead from this post to that vanished door. Where long ago the snow had blown through during a storm as a small child sat eating a rough meal made by hands of love.

  She opened her eyes and stood. Lifted the front of her skirts and stepped from the flowers and made her way back to the laundry basket. She reached and lifted up a pair of trousers and shook them as she looked about her. She thought it only moments but had no clear sense how long she’d been squatting and walked to the fence to spread them to dry, having spied no one. August and Harlan were ditching. The shadows of the sun hadn’t moved more than a quarter hour. Her skirts were nearly dry, as they would quickly on such a summer day.

  She continued spreading the laundry upon the garden fence and then over the lower branches of the lilac, shirts tossed up like wings upon the forsythia long since shed of blossoms, the array of tight small branches catching the shirts as if darted. Over and again she glanced down the lanes but did not see the men coming yet. They’d be along soon.

  Her brother had taken to drinking coffee but had yet to determine when he’d want it. August, always in the morn, now and again after supper but never midday in summer: Then he only wanted cool water suffused with cider vinegar, grated nutmeg, gingerroot and a touch of cane or maple molasses. She’d tasted it once and hadn’t liked the bite, though an hour later had been struck by a restlessness to finish everyday tasks before her.

  The wind had mostly died, the air coming off the barley, oat and wheat fields sank about her, smelt of bread and porridge, of winter cow breath, of yeast and heat. It was very hot and the days were long but soon would be longer.

  What she did remember clearly was the day she’d left: the bitter winter day of high pale sky, wind whipping snow devils off the drifts as she huddled between her mother and the man driving a bobsled, her brother wrapped in blankets and held within her mother’s coat and shawl—Becca’s own coat thin against the wind, her scarf over her head and tied tight about her throat. The squeal of the runners against the brittle snow, the slap and thump of the heavy harness on the horses, plumes of breath freezing above the big heads nodding up and down with their work. The sled held the frame of the bed her father had died upon, two shuck mattresses, the table and two chairs and a wooden box holding her mother’s kitchen goods. Three flour sacks held what little clothing they were not wearing.

  Her glance back revealed the house, a single story with a loft under the peaked roof, sides of rough-riven shingles, all of it surrounded and covered with the same hard wind-packed snow they were driving through. And beyond the house, stark in its hugeness as a strange vessel beached on an unknown shore, rose the large, neat and tight barn. It had never held more than a milk cow, hens, a single pig bought in the
spring to fatten upon the land for fall butchering, empty now but also, as her mother would tell her, never but a ghost of promise, as good as empty always.

  “Your father,” Phoebe Davis had told her some years later, “was a good man, a loving and tender man who counted to six and thought he’d reached ten. I loved him dear, but when his heart quit upon him it seemed only one more misstep in his planning.” This said gently and free of knowledge of her own death already brewing in the swamp downstream from Albert Ruddle’s house that would settle upon her the next summer.

  When the bobsled came to a stop, Albert Ruddle refused to open his door but stood in the snow and argued with the driver: Becca had searched her mind but had no idea who that driver had been beyond a member of their community who’d taken on this task. Albert had a buffalo robe wrapped over his winter clothes, his woolen winter cap with the earflaps turned down and tied under his chin, and what showed of his face was small and tipped up, sharp-snouted and red with the cold. Becca thought him to be some creature come out of the woods, a large muskrat or fat mink that would chew her up to be rid of her. She thought a mistake had been made—that this man wanted nothing of her and what remained of her family.

  Then her mother spoke up. “Arriving as I have, Mr. Ruddle, I know better than you how cold it is. But I won’t leave my possessions, few as they are, standing out in your yard in hopes of a warmer day. Look how quickly we can move them inside and be done with it. And I’ll poke the fires up straight away. Cold? Yes it is.”

  She stepped down from the sled to stand before Albert Ruddle and opened her shawl and handed the bundle of her infant out and Albert took the bundle without knowing what it was, pure response to being offered something.