A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  When he woke that first night she was beside him and had left a lamp guttering on the table so he could find his way outside to pass water and stand with his head tilted back, searching for the few stars and moon visible beyond the giant tree crowns. He stood a longer moment but there was nowhere to go but back inside, back to the bed beside her. And nowhere else he wanted to go. She lay awaiting him, covered only by the sheet, which she lifted against any hesitation he might own. Once beside her she pushed him gently onto his back, the lamp still low as she raised on an elbow and spoke to him.

  “I did that because I wanted to,” she said.

  When he struggled for words she laid a finger over his lips and shushed him. Then she said, “Like most things there was a host of reasons, but mostly because I wanted to. But Harlan? Also I couldn’t let you go. Like I said, I’m hid out too. And I didn’t want you telling anyone I was here.”

  And she took her finger away and waited.

  “All right,” Harlan said, as old as he was, which was much older than he’d known himself to be, all ways. “Tell me what you’re hid out from. You already made clear you wasn’t about to speak up for Bethany Hopeton. I didn’t come here expecting you, or looking for you. So what could it be you’re hiding from?”

  She pressed over him and stood out of the bed and walked to the table and prized the cork on a bottle of beer and swallowed and came back to the bed carrying the bottle. She again stepped over him but settled down with her back against the wall, cross-legged, the sheet tugged over just her lap as she sat facing him, one knee nudging his ribcage. Her breasts high and pink in the light, her face swaddled by her tangled hair. She reached her free hand and traced a line from his belly button up to the hollow of his throat and took the finger away, wrapping both hands around the bottle upright atop the sheet.

  He watched her as she did all this and watched also as she sat worrying her lower lip with her teeth and he said, “It’s what you said at the hotel, ain’t it?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I been sick with worry you’d recall that and tell someone. Have you done that?”

  “That it was on account of you that Amos and Bethany rode in that day? That’s what you were getting at?”

  “Don’t torment me. You don’t have to torment me. I never expected it would turn out how it did! Can’t you see that?”

  “Hey, now.” He reached and placed a hand on her knee, letting it rest and then working the hand upon her knee. “I think it’s fair to say that was a day where nothing turned out how anyone thought it would, any one of us. And no, I have not told a soul. But their coming in like they did? You play a part in that?”

  She looked level out into someplace on the far dark wall, beyond the lamplight and said, “After Malcolm Hopeton come home, after Amos and Bethany run off once they got word he was coming home, I sat down here in the woods and got worried Hopeton would come looking for me and so went to my friend Bertha Pinckney and she took me in and put me up and never once asked why. I set up there in that hot attic room and knew Amos wasn’t coming back—that he’d throwed me over once and for all. All he’d said, all he’d promised didn’t mean a thing cept to keep me on the string for his own amusement, his own use when he wanted me. You know Amos and you know he’d take what he wanted when he wanted it. And I set up there thinking about all he’d told me, all he’d said about Mr. Hopeton over the years and it come to my mind that Amos was due a lesson, one he’d maybe never had. Slick? How Amos seen himself as if there was a magic butter run over him that made him a tad smarter than any around him could see and that kept trouble from pouring upon him, if he’d earned it or not. Maybe especially if he’d earned it. And I seen that all those years it had worked for him. He’d fooled us all. Hopeton and me, most. The longest. Bethany Hopeton also, though it ain’t fair to strictly say he’d fooled her: I think he made sure she had no choice but to take what he offered. Amos was a mean creature, no doubt there.”

  She drank off the rest of the bottle and tossed it toward the open door, where it clattered and then went soft against the night. Now she looked at Harlan. He was waiting, had been waiting, her eyes.

  She said, “So I thought to myself, Two can play that game. What could draw Amos back? What could make him think he hadn’t shook that tree yet for all it was worth? All I wanted was the chance for him to get caught in his own dirt, to think things was such a way that he could squeeze it all for the last bit. It came to me, just like that. I sat down and wrote him a letter. And I sent it to the Huntsman Hotel in Utica, where, even if he was only to pass by now and again, he had an arrangement for such things to be held for him. I wasn’t even sure they was in Utica. Amos was always cagey with money and God knows he could’ve had enough to take him and that bitch most anywhere on earth they might decide to go. But while I knew it was possible, I had a good strong gut telling me if he weren’t in Utica he weren’t far off. A fox, if it thinks the hounds is after it, won’t hightail ridge after ridge but will circle around and around, trying to see if the way back to its den is clear or not, when it might be safe to slip back in. So I sent that letter. And he got it and sure enough come back not a week later.”

  “You lured him back.”

  “I did.”

  “How so? What did you write him?”

  She stood off the bed again and walked to stand in the doorway, looking upon the darkness beyond. She wrapped her arms about the front of her and he saw her skin was up in gooseflesh, Harlan still stunned with the sight, still trying to understand the vast strangeness of a woman, how similar to himself, how very different. And how she shook in the doorway against a cold that was not within the cabin nor coming from without but some far greater distance. He thought to go to her, rising up from the mattress when she turned back.

  She stood looking at him. Now all upright and free of any tremor. Her eyes locked upon him and she strode forward and was talking before she perched upon the side of the bed, this time blocking the lamplight so she was a medium of dark form, the lamplight a corona behind her.

  “I wrote that Hopeton was ruined from the war. That he was useless as a man. That after he got home he run you off or you took it upon yourself but you were surely gone and he wasn’t making the first attempt to farm or do anything at all. Told how I snuck up there in the evening and peered through a window and saw him setting in that half-bare house muttering and talking to himself, sometimes getting up to walk back and forth talking out loud and gesturing with his hands like he was in conversation with someone but wasn’t anybody there but him. How he done that all hours of the day and night. How I’d seen him sleeping middle of the day out in one of his grown-over hay fields and other times he wandered about the farm ragged and dirty as a tramp, his hair and beard grown out and his clothes a mess. I didn’t mention Missus Hopeton; truth is I figured it most likely Amos would come back alone to scout it out, learn what he could make of it.”

  “When you mailed that, what did you want to happen?”

  She looked off a time and then said, “I guess I was hoping Malcolm Hopeton would give him a beating. Remember, what I wrote and what I saw was two very different things. And Amos, like many men of his nature, was at heart a coward. It was easy for him to hurt and scare folks weaker or less able than him and he knew it, which was why he done it. But a able-bodied man, a man lived hard and rough as Hopeton had through the war—why Amos wouldn’t a been a match for him. Maybe I was thinking Hopeton would have Amos arrested; Lord knows there was a bounty of charges could’ve been brought. Maybe I was hoping for that, too. Have him locked up a time, was my thinking.”

  “That’s what you were after? Truly?”

  She was quiet a bit and then said, “Regardless how he explains it, or how it comes to be, when your man is fucking another woman there comes a time you tell yourself, ‘Quit this.’ For me it was more complicated. I thought, How far will he take me for a fool and how will I let him know he’s done that? And that was my plan to let him figure it out. I thought he’
d have a good long time to ponder upon it.”

  “I guess he’s got eternity now. To ponder upon it.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  He gazed pensively a moment and said, “I don’t think there’s a thing for you to worry over. If he’d carried that letter with him, someone would’ve found you, the hotel or here, by now. There ain’t anyone knows but me.”

  “And you’re here. Hid out, as you say. I aim to keep you that way a day or so.” She leaned and kissed him. He kissed her back, reached for her shoulders, and she came into the bed.

  He said, “I’d be in town for the hearing, though. To see what happens.”

  “That could work,” she said, leading him up as she moved under.

  He woke from dreamless sleep, aching beside her, and she lay waiting for his eyes to flutter open and then reached to hold him and then guide him. He was clumsy and swift and she purred soft sounds almost words into his ear as if to console him or mark her own pleasure with the moment—he did not know and somehow until the moment knew not to ask. She was patient and allowed him to discover his own strength and this time he was more certain, beginning to discover not only himself but what measures of motion seemed to please her. To stop and start. He was a gentle boy and if there were times she wished for less gentleness she gave no signal, no urging whisper. As if knowing he needed to learn his gentleness in this way, to prove it upon himself and demonstrate it for her.

  An ill-used boy who confused force with strength and she knew this of him. More so than he did, yet.

  She made coffee and fed him and went out, taking care to tell him she was going to the stream for water, obvious enough as she held the empty bucket in her hand but he understood why she told him such and lay back upon the blankets and watched a small rill of dust work free of the shake roof where some wood-boring insect drilled, the dust falling fine as captured trickling ancient sunlight. When she returned her hair was wet and the shift she’d left with was over one arm, her skin beaded and prickled from the water. She stood beside the bed and handed a dipper to him and said, “Later we’ll go together. It’s a nice pool.”

  He’d started to ask “Why not now?” when she touched the cool dipper to his upward prodding and came back into the bed. The dipper thumped and bounced upon the rugs.

  That afternoon he woke alone and was alarmed to note the absence of her riding clothes, was seated upon the bed wondering if she’d left, if she’d someway found him lacking. Then saw the spider over the coals holding a diced hash of bacon, potatoes and onions, smelling this across the room as a dart to his stomach. Squatting before the fire and spooning up food, he decided they weren’t so unlike, perhaps more alike than he could know.

  He was back on the bed, drifting in and out of sleep in a daze of restlessness, the full heat of late afternoon now descending through the canopy, the cabin close and moist and sotted with the scent of her rising all around him from the blankets when she walked back in. She set a basket of wild plums on the table and looked him up and down and said, “Maybe someone’s been working you too hard, you sleeping so much as all this.”

  He sat up blinking and rubbed his hands against his eyes, the backs of his palms against the bone sockets, and said, “It’s high summer. Until I fetched up here I was cutting oats from first light to full dark.”

  She was removing her clothes, then slipped into her gown but did not come to the bed. “Put your trousers on,” she said. “It’s all you need the off chance we run into someone.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Where you wanted to go, earlier.”

  “You think we might come across someone?”

  She looked at him, let her shoulders rise and fall. “No. There’s no reason to think so. Let’s go. You ready?”

  They left the cabin, Harlan wearing his trousers, Alice Ann carrying the plums. Once they threaded the path through the chestnuts and emerged into the open woods the heat poured on them, sunlight refracting from lesser leaves, shafts like drills breaking through, deerflies swarming around them. Alice Ann walked through it all as if there was nothing there but her destination. Harlan following on the narrow path, batting against the swift darts of the droning flies, his eyes swinging between the basket of plums and Alice Ann’s backside clearly visible beneath the cloth.

  He thought he might follow her all of his days, thus, and happily so.

  Once while walking he thought he heard a horse whicker and turned toward the sound but only saw a running clump of hickories and oaks and when he thought to look back Alice Ann’s head was straight forward, forging on.

  They went down a steep path with small outcroppings of shale in thin layers, some broken free and sharp underfoot. In his four years upon this land he’d never been here, not even known it existed. He bent to pick free a sliver of shale from his foot, the color of oil and half the size of his hand, lifted it and saw in the rock the spiral of some ancient snail shell and stood, wondering over that. A perfection of detail cast in stone, coils and scrolls. Then looked up and saw she was far below him and tossed it aside and went on.

  The pool was only a bend in a small stream beneath oaks and sycamores, the water deepest where the bank had eroded under the roots of a looming oak, clear but copper colored from the pea-stone gravel in the outer shallow edge, the drift of sand under the deeper water. Alice Ann pulled off her gown and laid it on the dry pebbles and waded across and hung the basket over a low-slung stub of root emerging from the bank so the plums were washed and cooled in the flow, then settled down and stretched out on her back in that same flowing deep water, digging her heels into the gravel of the bend to hold her in place, her hair flowing wet around her shoulders, her face tilted toward the sunlight coming at an angle from the western slope of the ravine. She’d closed her eyes.

  There was a scattering of browned oak leaves caught in the jewelweed growing beside the stream. Harlan stood on the small pebbled beach to unbutton his flies, let his trousers drop, and stepped out of them and waded in, aligning himself alongside Alice Ann on his back, his own heels dug next to hers to hold against the slow current. The water was cool as a new sheath of skin and quickly his body was no longer hot nor cold, as if the water had made him neutral and bound to the earth from which the water rose. As Alice Ann did, he kept his gaze upward, all but his toes and face submerged, and he could not turn to look at her without his mouth going under the water and so witnessed her from a place both close by and distant.

  She lolled in the water toward the tree root and back against him and one of her heels lost its anchor and she drifted, then caught and pushed herself back. Once settled she lay quiet a moment, then said, “Mostly life makes promises it can’t keep. But every now and again it surprises us, isn’t that right, Harlan?”

  He held silence close then.

  After a moment she lifted her arm from the water and took a wild plum from the basket and reached it across to him. It was near-black, stippled with purple along the seams of the fruit, dripping. She said, “You want a plum?”

  He took it from her and bit into it, tearing the thick skin and then a gobbet of the fruit came free, his teeth raking against the stone, his mouth lit sweet and sour as he chewed. And bit again, the hunger sudden and deep upon him. And also saw her cocked elbow as she ate a plum, the sound of his clicking jaws filling his under-water ears like heartbeats, the wash of water over it all until he tossed the stripped stone downstream and lifted to watch it float away. Turned on his elbow and she was also up, sitting in the water low about her waist. A shred of plum skin stuck upon her lower lip.

  “I never understood it,” he said.

  “That would cover a mile of country all around and some beyond,” she said. “But you’re gaining.”

  He grinned at her and she smiled back, reached and did something with his wet hair upon his forehead, then dropped her hand back into the stream.

  He looked back down between his knees at the turmoil of gravel and said, “That second winter whe
n he cut all the peach trees down and split em up. That filled a shed of wood. He done a lot of things didn’t make sense but that’s one sticks in my mind. I was out there watching not that he’d of known it. He went at those trees like a fury. He was a hand with a ax, although that was the only time I seen it. The rest of those years wood was my job.”

  “You ever seen him eat a peach?”

  He thought back and said, “It was only the one summer when Missus Hopeton was cutting em and drying em and there was always a heap on the table and she and I both ate em. He never once did.” He paused and went on. “Then the trees were gone.”

  She said, “I never knew what it was about peaches: I used to beg him to bring me some and more than once I snuck up after dark to grab some but I knew better than to let Amos know about it. Those first few years I thought it was all how Amos told me; he didn’t trust to tell me what his real thoughts was for a good while, even though he knew from the first day he had me heart, body and soul. It wasn’t even when Hopeton married that woman—Yes, I hate her, but I feel sorry for her also. She never had a chance against Amos Wheeler once her man went off to the war. And it was only then that Amos made clear he’d known that somehow he was going to ruin Malcolm Hopeton from the first moment they met. He never would tell me why, or even when that was. I almost thought it was all high talk cept you got to recall I’d seen Amos in action all sorts of ways, other places. Truth is, you get down to it, the only person he ever truly didn’t take full account of was me. That’s not a brag; I been thinking about it and I see when he plucked me up he didn’t know a thing about me cept he saw something in me and then he forgot about that a little bit—not a whole lot because that was not his way but just enough so he told me and showed me a bit more of hisself than he thought he was doing as he spun out his plan for how we’d get rich off Hopeton’s farm and hightail it out a here. Thinking I’d believe that. And I did. For a while.”