A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  She opened the other side of the saddlebags and lifted out a wide belt of fine leather and a folded document sealed with a blood-crimson blot of wax. She opened the buttons of her habit and worked the belt around her waist, snugged it tight and rebuttoned the habit, then fitted the vest and buttoned it. With her fingers at work she glanced at him and said, “That’s a money belt I got hid there, Mr. Dying of Curiosity.”

  A sudden fool, he said, “It looks good on you.”

  She looked at him and arched an eyebrow and said, “Can you saddle a horse?”

  “A course I can.” His face was hot and he guessed some shade of red.

  “Not just tightening the girths. There’s a scrap of burlap behind the door he’s familiar with and I want you to rub him down all over and talk to him while you do it. He’s not been ridden in days and needs a gentle hand.”

  “I can do that just fine—”

  “His name’s Pepper. Once he knows you, he’ll eat outta your hand without the least nip and carry you to Kingdom Come, you ask.”

  He said, “A horse knows its name and how it’s treated, also. I’m happy to gear him up for you. But I’m wondering—what’s the plan, we get to town? I know what I have to do but I don’t have the first idea what you’re thinking.”

  “All the better that way, Harlan,” she said, her tone but not voice raised a bit. “We got time to talk on the road but for now I’ve got some more work here. Could you just see to the horse, please?”

  He stood looking at her a moment and then found the wadded burlap smelling of horse sweat and dust and went out the door to where the horse edged about among the chestnut trunks, the saddle and pad on the ground, the horse watching him come, eyes rolling and a bit of froth at its mouth. He stood and spoke to it and spoke again and the horse turned to face him and he opened the burlap and scrunched it together again and kept talking as he moved a step at a time toward the horse. Once the horse bunched low to bolt and Harlan only kept talking and the horse shivered and settled upright, then jerked its head against a deerfly. And then Harlan had the burlap against the horse’s withers, the other hand rubbing about the halter and his mouth close to the near ear and was still talking to him.

  As they went along, both Harlan and the horse watched as Alice Ann came from the cabin, carrying a bridle headstall and reins. She said, “I knew you was a hand with horses.”

  “Me and Pepper been coming to understand each other.”

  “I guessed you would.” She handed him the bridle and he held it against his side a moment as the horse cupped its ears forward and nosed the bridle. Harlan fitted the bridle to the horse’s head and slid a finger into the side of the horse’s mouth where the gap of teeth was and Pepper slipped the bit in easy as if eating an apple from his hand. Then the horse turned its head as if appraising the upended saddle and thick felted pad.

  Alice Ann said, “You drop his reins on the ground he’ll stand like a statue while you finish him up.”

  “I heard about that trick with a riding horse,” Harlan said. But Alice Ann was off at the woodpile the far edge of the clearing, pulling forth small dried branches and looking at the lesser splits of kindling wood, selecting as she went until she had a considerable pile all of fine small wood that would not make a fire, even all put together at once, of any consequence. But she gathered it up and carried it inside.

  Harlan rubbed over the horse once more with the sacking, taking the easy pleasure of working with a good, smart horse. He stepped away and untangled the pad from the straps of the saddle and brushed both sides clean and set it up high on the horse’s withers. He lifted the saddle and studied it a moment until he knew how all the gear worked and placed it gentle as could be upon the pad, let the stirrups slide down either side and then eased both saddle and pad downward a scant inch or two, making sure the hair of the horse’s hide lay flat beneath the saddle and pad. No telling, he thought, how far this feller will have to run later this day.

  Alice Ann came from the cabin and looked at him but went on back to the woodpile, which she studied, and then walked on off out of the clearing. Soon she returned laboring under a load of a dozen long snapped-off branches of deadwood, each a couple or more stout inches around and six or seven feet long. She glanced at him as she passed but went on without words within the cabin.

  He walked the horse in a circle and waited.

  After a time she came out again, this time carrying her saddlebags and the document in her other hand. She set down the saddlebags on the woods floor at the edge of the grove and slipped the document within one side.

  She turned and studied the cabin, casting her eyes not only over it but all around—at the big trees, the fire ring of blackened stones, the woodpile, back to the cabin again. She stared long upon that building and Harlan watched her and was silent, waiting.

  Finally she looked to him. “Why don’t you come in, one last time?” Without waiting she walked inside.

  He spoke to the horse and then walked to the low, wide door framed with old peeled log uprights, the bark also long since fallen from the log walls. He stepped in and stopped.

  A fire burned in the hearth and then about a foot away there was laid a small windrow of heaped kindling wood that stretched across the floor to underneath the table, where the row met a larger pile of wood. Likewise the tabletop held an even higher stack of wood, layered neatly and made so as to fall inward as it burned. Rising from within that stack were the long poles that spread outward up among the timbers of the rafters like an Indian tepee frame turned upside down. The chairs were leaned in against the table also.

  Alice Ann squatted next to the hearth sipping the last bottle of beer. Beside her was the final stack of kindling, enough to breach the gap between the fire and the beginning of the row of wood.

  She lifted the bottle and squinted over the top of it toward Harlan. “What do you think?” she said. “Should I take away the chairs?”

  He studied the setup and said, “You’re worried the table will burn too fast before the roof catches.”

  “I don’t think it will. But I’d hate to make the effort and just end up with some ruined furniture and scorched rugs.”

  He shook his head. “That tabletop will take some effort to burn through and you want a hot fire: Those chairs might just do the trick. Taking em away, you risk the poles not catching, or the roof.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s what I thought.” She took a swallow of beer and motioned him closer. He remained where he was.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “You want to burn the place down, it’s easy enough to do. Why set it up so slow and risk not having it take? A gust through the door or a handful of sticks falling the wrong way could end the whole thing, the fire not even getting to the table.”

  “Because I want it gone. But I don’t want to make a quick alarm out here. We laid a fire sure to burn fast and we’d not even make the road before there was smoke billowing up from the woods—all these blankets and rugs and such, even the roof has enough moss on it to make a dark smoke. I want it gone but I want us gone also. So we leave a little fire that becomes a mite larger and then burns on and gets the roof frame going from underneath and it could be as much as a hour before it burns through. That’s what I want. And I got my sticks laid right.”

  “You do,” Harlan said. “We shut the door as we go, that’ll keep a stray breeze from mucking about. But you want the fireplace burned down a bit first, so there’s not too much draw, there.”

  “You’d ever of been here on a winter night you’d know that chimney don’t draw so good: nights where there was more smoke inside than going up the chimney. Amos Wheeler was a wizard at many things but not a hand to build. Besides, you look close, this little fire is going quick, just enough to light the kindling when I add it. Which I’m about to do and then we walk out.”

  “All right.”

  She paused then and looked about her and spat in the dead ash spread on the hearth. She lifted the
bottle again and said, “You want to have a swallow of this before we go?”

  “I don’t believe so. I want my head clear as it can be.”

  She laughed and chucked the bottle underhand at the wall of open cupboards, where it landed and caused a rattle of collapse among the tinware and pots. She said, “Let’s go then.”

  She rose up and turned and lifted handfuls of the wood from the trail upon the floor toward the burning fire, stopping a couple of times to adjust the new stacking, then, with both hands full of the last of the kindling and a six-inch gap between the fire and the waiting wood, paused and looked up at the roof and all around, seeing there what she would or had no choice but to see one last time. Then she turned to Harlan and said, “Wait for me outside.”

  He was holding the horse when, faster then he’d expected, she stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind her. He could hear a faint popping and hiss but nothing more than a fire burning in the hearth would make. A pale plume came from the top of the chimney but was lost in the air and shadows as it rose into the chestnut grove. She walked to her saddlebags and lifted them and tied them in place. She came and took the reins from him and kissed the horse upon the nose and began walking, leading the horse and not looking back. Harlan right beside her.

  They came out upon the road and stopped. He held her stirrup as she stepped up into the saddle, the horse dancing a bit sideways until she curbed the bit back and settled her seat against the horse and he felt it and came to a full stop. Both she and Harlan looked first up and down the road and Harlan realized they were closer to town than he’d guessed, less than a half hour at a man’s pace walking, then also back toward where they’d come but all he saw was the track between two high stands of corn and then the distant crown of trees that marked the ravine and woodlot around it where the cabin stood. The heat stood shimmering over the fields and the tree crowns were murky under white sunlight, and if any smoke rose there it was pale and diffused into the day.

  He turned back to study the road again, fearful of coming across anyone, unsure what waited him this day and steeled to do his best, when she spoke.

  “There it is.”

  He looked to where she sat on the horse and followed her turned head and saw the least coil of inky smoke rising from the woods. And it came to him that Amos Wheeler was dead, truly dead and gone.

  He said, “We best walk on. It would help, one of us had a watch.” And turned and started down the road toward town.

  She caught up fast and then held the horse back alongside him and she said, “Have you ever owned a watch?”

  “No. I have not.”

  “You ever been late? Anywhere?”

  “No. Not that, either.”

  “I didn’t think so. Besides. I have a watch. Do you want to know what o’clock it is?”

  “It’s about half-past nine.”

  “I believe you’re about right.” She made no effort to produce a watch but rode along.

  He said, “I’m going to be most of a hour early.”

  She glanced down at him. “What’s your plan?”

  He did not look at her but kept walking. He said, “I’m going to tell em exactly the sort of man Amos was. I’d tell em everything I seen, everything I heard, everything that happened. They’d at least have to listen to it, in court like that. Wouldn’t they?”

  “I guess so. But you know, they do that, they’re also going to be able to ask any questions of you they want. Isn’t that what made you run off in the first place?”

  He was quiet but did glance at her and she was waiting for his eyes and nodded at him. He wasn’t sure what she was saying yes to, then did know.

  He said, “Enoch Stone has it in his head that Bethany Hopeton did something to me, or some such a thing. But she never did. And I can look him or anyone else in the eye and swear that’s the truth.”

  Quiet a moment but for the creak of saddle leather and the chip of the bit in the horse’s mouth. The soft pad of Harlan’s feet in the dust. Quiet enough so he looked up at her. She said, “I know you can.”

  He nodded and looked again upon the road and they went on for a bit. Finally he looked up at her and said, “I’d be lying I said I wasn’t nervous.”

  “You’ll be fine. You’ll be grand.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You will. You are.”

  With that they went on along the road that was dropping on the slight grade toward the canopied village below. The upper branch of the lake lay to the west in a long expanse with small white-capped waves, the breeze moving up the lake. One of the steamers was beating south toward the end of the Bluff that rose from the water and on the Bluff the farm fields and woodlots and gorges were outlined clear as a stencil in the morning air, the fields varying greens and golds as they held hay or pasture or ripe grains one sort or another. The thin-burnt look of grain stubble where the oats or barley had been cut. A pair of hawks rode the air rising off the Bluff and from the village below a bell tolled twice and then was silent. The spotty rise of dogs answering the bell rose and trailed away.

  Harlan looked back up the road, worried that by burning down Amos Wheeler’s shack they’d set the woods on fire, hot and dry as the days had been. But they’d crested down and could no longer see that place to the east of the crown of land and no pulse of dark smoke rose from over the edge of the eastern earth. At most a thin smudge against the white pale thrown down by an engorged and desolate sun. Something, perhaps. Or nothing but vapors rising.

  Offhand best he could, speaking to the dust about his feet, he said, “So what are you going to do?”

  “I thought I’d go to Saratoga. It’s barely high season there and I know a couple of people. It would be a good start. Nobody that matters has ever laid eyes upon me but I know those sorts and how it works. I think I could make a go of things there. I suspect I could make a go of things most anywhere. Don’t you think?”

  Of a sudden he was miserable and shuffled the dust up with his feet. He said, “I guess so.”

  She rode along beside him and didn’t say a word.

  They’d started down the residential street toward the village when she stopped the horse. They were beside the house where Harlan had darted down the side of the carriage barn and into the woods after fleeing Enoch Stone and so after Alice Ann halted the horse, Harlan looked around, half expecting that man to materialize, and when he did not, looked up at Alice Ann.

  “Now, then.” The horse stood easily, glancing around as a horse will but steady and patient as Alice Ann twisted around and opened the near saddlebag and lifted out the waxed document. She straightened forward and held it and studied it a moment.

  Then she looked down at Harlan. “Do you have a dollar?”

  He almost asked why when he caught himself and only said, “I’m sorry. I don’t have a thin dime. I was working afore I was started on this that ended me up here and I’m not in the habit of carrying cash money about me in the field. Are you short of money?”

  She smiled and it was a smile closer to sadness than mirth but also a kind smile and she said, “I shouldn’t have asked that; I knew better.” She dug in a pocket of her habit and pried free a Liberty dollar and handed it down to him.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “Call it a loan. Now hand it back to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  He did. She pushed the coin back in her habit and swung down from the horse and held out the document and waited until he took it from her. She said, “Break the seal and read that.”

  He did and then looked up at her. “I don’t understand this.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. You just bought a horse. A damn good one, too. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  She’d dipped her head away as she said this but not quick enough to keep him from hearing the break of her voice or seeing her eyes in sudden liquid flitting blinks.

  He looked at the paper again, a bill of sale, simple as
any could be but solid nonetheless and there below the jagged rough scrawl of her own name was his own, in tight up-and-down loops that were not close to what he’d drilled over and over in school or home at Albert Ruddle’s table with that man or his own sister leaning over him, but instead a making of his name done only as differently as possible from her own style; and Harlan felt the soft blow of tenderness as he realized the work this woman had undertaken for him, likely furtive while he’d slept, day or night, these past days.

  He said, “Why are you giving me your horse?”

  “Let’s walk on down,” she said. And stepped off, both arms swinging free. The black horse followed her, then paused, the reins still looped upon its withers. Harlan stepped up and pulled the reins over the horse’s head and caught up to Alice Ann, the horse happy now to trail his people.

  She said, “I thought you might need him, however things work out. One way or another.”

  “But how are you going to get to Saratoga?”

  They were striding at a good pace. She shot her chin toward him and said, “You don’t like him?”

  “He’s the best I ever seen.”

  “That’s right. He’ll do you well—whatever you need.”

  They walked on a bit more. They passed a house where an old man sat out on a porch in a rocking chair, wearing a rusted black Sunday suit but bare-headed. He was reading a newspaper but lowered it so his eyes dipped above and followed them a moment. Then he lifted it and was hidden again.

  They were most at the end of the residential street and could see the bulk of Burketts’ mill rising, the sharp angle into the mercantile blocks, when quiet and easy Harlan said, “You ain’t going to Saratoga, are you?”

  “Whatever makes you say such a thing as that?”

  “Because you sold me your horse.”

  Alice Ann glanced at him and made a snorted laugh and said, “One day, you’re married, remember this: You out-think your wife, it’s not always the best thing to let her know it.”