Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  Harp looked up at him with the same blank expression. “Patience and a sharp knife. All a man needs.”

  Turner would have replied, but Webb motioned him toward the desk, where he was eagerly flipping pages in the book.

  “Here’s my question,” he said eagerly. “The citizens of Daybreak greet the sunrise every morning with a chant, as you describe it. I wonder if this chant might be made into a song? Have we any musicians among our advance party?”

  “I don’t know,” Turner murmured, running his finger across the passage. “It’s been weeks since I received any correspondence.” He hated to admit that he had no idea if the chant could be set to music, that the chant had just popped into his fancy one afternoon as a good way to open a chapter, the happy islanders all gathered to greet the morning.

  He traced the words of the anthem:

  Where there is inequality, let us bring balance.

  Where there is suspicion, let us bring trust.

  Where there is exclusion, let us bring openness.

  Where there is division, let us bring harmony.

  Where there is darkness, let us bring Daybreak.

  September 1857

  Chapter 6

  “Homo homini lupus.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Adam Cabot tilted his head.

  “Man is a wolf to man,” Charlotte said. “My father used to say it at every opportunity.”

  They rode in silence for a minute, bouncing gently on the spring seats of the wagon. The road, by now just parallel tracks through the forest, was smooth for a little while, a blessing after the miles of jolts. From the steamboat landing at Sainte Genevieve there was a plank road as far as Farmington, but for the last thirty miles the wagon roads had gotten steadily narrower and rougher.

  Their subject, as always, was the trouble in Kansas, the trouble in the capital, the trouble in the nation.

  “After he came back from Mexico, that is,” she continued. She glanced at the young man sitting beside her. “Once he was home and started teaching again, he would get the strangest expression. He would look toward you but through you, as if there was someone behind you he was addressing. And that’s when he would say it.”

  Cabot’s face, usually so open, became careful and composed. “He’ll get no argument from me,” he finally said. “But wartime is a different matter. Perhaps the horrors of war blind a man to the higher possibilities of mankind.”

  Charlotte gazed out at the thick screen of blackjack oaks and hickories they were passing through. She had to admit the scenery was beautiful. The hills were not as high as the Adirondacks of her childhood, but the landscape was equally rugged, and in the warm light of September, Charlotte found to her surprise that she was enjoying the trip. She and Cabot had met the first group of settlers in St. Louis, fifty-four of them, and they had embarked en masse for the trip south. It felt good to be in the countryside. Cabot, innately idealistic, had taken to the plan for the great experiment despite his own recent reverses, although they could never seem to keep the conversation from drifting back to Kansas. At Sainte Genevieve they chartered wagons for the trip inland, and Adam’s good humor and educated language made everyone look to him for leadership. His black hair had just begun to grow out again, and sometimes he rubbed his head with a serious expression before bursting into fits of laughter at the ridiculousness of his appearance. The Eastern cut of his clothes marked him as a butt of everyone’s jokes, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  She could use all the idealism he had to spare. The parting from her father still made her sad. She had not handled the departure well—first the rush into marriage, then her decision to join her husband in Daybreak before she had been sent for. She could see in her father’s eyes that he had doubted her common sense.

  The wagon road came to a clearing. Set back from the road was a cluster of stick-and-earth huts, strange-looking affairs, five feet tall, with thin strings of smoke rising from the centers of their roofs. Charlotte could see women and children moving among the huts, dark-haired, dark-skinned, and ragged. Two of the children walked toward the passing wagons and held out their arms mutely, palms upraised, fingers loosely curled.

  Cabot turned to the wagon driver behind them, a local man they had hired. “What’s this?”

  “That’s the Creek Nation,” the wagoner said. “Missouri branch. Army left them here to die during the Removal, and they never got around to it.”

  The wagoner cast a glance over the group, all of whom had now stopped to watch the wagons pass. “Seems like there’s more of them since last time I came through here.”

  The children kept their arms extended as they drove by.

  “Do you think—” Charlotte asked.

  “I’ll check,” said Cabot. He handed her the reins and jumped down from the wagon, swinging himself onto the one behind as it neared. He conferred head to head with the wagoner for a moment, then just as nimbly hopped down and trotted back.

  “He says no,” Cabot said, lifting himself onto the seat. “They’ll follow us all the way to the colony. He says the men are probably out somewhere finding food.”

  “Those children don’t look fed to me.”

  “We’ll go a mile or two, then I’ll ride back,” he said. “They’ll never try to keep up with a man on horseback.”

  “There’s a half ham in the back of this wagon. Take it.”

  The road descended sharply from the ridgetop, the forest changing from oak to cedar, and as they dropped into the river valley the trail grew worse, nothing more than a cleared cascade of rocks. They inched over shelves of rock one wheel at a time. A broken wheel now would cost them half a day. Charlotte checked over her shoulder at their precious load—Cabot’s cast-iron Washington press and twelve trays of type. They had immobilized it in the wagon bed as best they could with sacks of flour and sugar, but Charlotte still dreaded the idea of the wagon tipping in some creek bed, thousands of tiny letters spilling into oblivion.

  After the wedding, she and Turner had spent a week at Arrow Rock, truly alone for the first time. Turner worked on plans for his triumphant return lecture tour to the cities of the West—Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis. Charlotte had thrown herself into the role of correspondent and organizer. And in the nights she was surprised by the ardor with which she embraced the joys of marriage. The first night was awkward and strange, but the second night came easier, and by the third night she was reaching for him even before he reached for her. She knew that this new life was what she had spurned all those cadets for; by day to support and disburden her man, her original thinker, and by night to join with him, to delight in his strength and vigor. But then he had returned to the lecture circuit, and then came the offer of land for a settlement.

  Of course it had all happened too fast, she knew that. But after her years of suspension, she had been poised and ready to move. The speed didn’t frighten her.

  But these last acts—Turner taking on the colony, just accepting the land without seeing it, without pausing to consider, without consulting her, and she in turn making the abrupt decision to join him, although he had said he would need a few months to build cabins and clear ground—these moves had been fast in a different way. They felt whimsical, ill-considered.

  “Mrs. Turner?” Still strange to hear the new name. Adam Cabot brought her up short. She jumped in her seat and looked around. They were about halfway down the long rocky slope and had reached a glade. The trail edged along a bluff, giving a view of the river bottom below. She gazed out. The river shone in the late afternoon light like a ribbon of mercury; on the other side was a thick grove of cottonwoods and sycamores, with a valley beyond it, broad and long, open meadows and crop fields, and at the far end two houses, one white, one brown. The houses were tiny against a high, thickly forested hill behind them, and the forest sent fingers of trees down its slopes into the bottomland, reclaiming the ground that human hands had cleared.

  “The driver behind us says tha
t’s the colony site,” Cabot said. “We descend here, and then there’s a ford. Our land is just beyond.”

  “And—?” Charlotte looked behind her, thinking of the children on the ridge. The line of wagons snaked back as far as she could see.

  “I’ll get us across the ford, then ride back,” Cabot said. “I’ve got the ham.”

  “Thank you.” She paused. “Adam—?”

  “Yes?”

  “He doesn’t know I’m coming.”

  Cabot gave her a questioning look, and she could see surprise mingled with curiosity in his features. But ever the gentleman, he didn’t press her further. “Then he will be doubly pleased by our arrival.” He urged the mules forward. In a short time they had reached the ford, the wagons crossing one at a time to avoid interfering with each other.

  Charlotte looked upriver as they crossed. So this was the St. Francis he had written her about. It seemed a good river, medium-sized, a bit of a current, more clear than muddy. The crossing had a solid bottom and was not too deep; the mules’ bellies got wet but that was all. The trees were thick and as tall as church steeples. Behind the trees she could see more hills, higher than the one they had just come down.

  The mules struggled up the bank then settled into an easy walk as the track wound through the cottonwoods and sycamores on the other side. Cabot handed her the reins, hopped down and took the ham, borrowed a horse from a later wagon, and was gone.

  As he trotted his horse through the forest with the ham resting on his saddle, Cabot pondered this latest bit of news. Why had Charlotte not told her husband of her coming? She was not the type of woman to travel three hundred miles for the childish pleasure of a moment’s surprise. Perhaps pure devotion? She knew he did not want her out here, but couldn’t bear his refusal. That would be in character with the Charlotte he’d gotten to know over the past weeks—firm to the point of hardheadedness, yet with a core of loving-kindness just below that solid surface.

  Not his business, he supposed, but worrisome nevertheless. There were no private matters for this man Turner any more—he had more than fifty people to lead in this venture, with perhaps hundreds more to come. He didn’t think it proper to speculate about what passed between Charlotte and her husband, but he couldn’t help the thoughts that ranged through his mind. Could it be that she suspected something irregular in the man’s removal to this far country? Nonsense, he told himself, with a reminder to avoid evil speculation in the future. But then nothing was regular about their embarkation on this journey.

  The lessons of history led him to doubt the ideas in Travels to Daybreak, but he was curious to meet James Turner. Charlotte’s descriptions of him made him seem a combination of Solon and Socrates, but Cabot marked that down to the rosy views of a woman in love. Not that he had any practical experience in such matters, he thought with a pang. Shy since childhood, he had never shone at the play parties and dances, and although he had had a few flirtations and walks along the Charles, he had never loved nor felt himself to be loved in that glowing way. He had yet to meet his ideal woman—someone idealistic yet practical, someone who would be a partner and confidante, not merely a dependent. A Titania for his Oberon, a match of both head and heart.

  All right, so he was envious of this man he had yet to meet, who had managed to find a bright and witty—and handsome—woman to marry. So he wanted to meet him for that reason if nothing else, to learn his secret. No crime in that.

  He reached the Indian village and climbed down from his horse. At first no one could be seen, but then a boy emerged from one of the huts. He looked suspiciously at Cabot for a moment before approaching.

  “Here,” Cabot said. He swung the ham from its resting place on his saddle.

  The boy ran inside without a word.

  For several awkward minutes, Cabot waited in the clearing, the ham resting on his saddle horn. Finally the boy came out again with a bundle wrapped in cloth, and they exchanged items. Cabot unfolded the bundle. Inside were corn-cakes of some sort, boiled rather than baked, with an odd blue sheen. Cabot broke off a piece.

  “Good!” he said. They were cold and gritty.

  The boy held the ham over his head. “Thank you,” he muttered as he turned toward the houses.

  “Thank you,” Cabot replied. He waved in the direction of the huts, sure that he was being watched. He mounted his horse, reflecting on the odd ways in which the demands of dignity revealed themselves, and rode away.

  Charlotte was glad for the time alone. She wondered how Turner would take her unexpected arrival. The driver in front of her was whistling “Clementine” again. He had been whistling it for what seemed like weeks. Didn’t he know any other tunes? Perhaps she should teach him.

  And then the wagon path opened up into a broad clearing and on the far side of the clearing she could see him. He was still far away but she recognized him instantly, although he had grown a beard in their months apart. He and another man, an elderly-looking gentleman, were paired on a crosscut saw, felling a tree. He had laid his hat and coat aside, and the sunlight caught the tousles of his light brown hair. In an instant all worries fell away.

  The wagon road ran along the river’s edge, through the heavy shade of the high trees, with dogwoods and pawpaws in the understory. Through the foliage she could see the river to her left, the barest of ripples on its surface. To her right the forest thinned out. There were about ten acres where trees had been girdled and were standing dead, waiting to be cut. Then cleared ground, some of it planted, some open and grassy. At the far end of the valley, the white house was set halfway up the slope, with weathered clapboard siding; and about a hundred yards closer to her, a cabin, newly built, the logs rough-hewn and not fully chinked; and in front of the cabin, Turner and the older man, who now had seen the wagons approaching and straightened from their sawing. Turner took his coat from a nearby bush, put it on, and waved his hat.

  By now most of the wagons had entered the clearing. Charlotte looked behind her; there were thirty of them, one right after the other, laden with goods and people. As they caught sight of Turner, the people in the front wagons sent up a cheer, which spread down the line; even those just emerging from the forest knew that they had arrived. Charlotte joined in. Turner, still waving his hat, climbed a stump for a better view; Charlotte stood up in her wagon, reins in her hand, and waved back.

  She could see his surprise when he recognized her. He paused in mid-wave and nearly lost his balance. But he recovered quickly and soon was striding to greet them.

  Turner took the reins from her, tied the mules to a tree, and helped her down from the wagon. Charlotte could feel that he was thinner now; his grip was strong, and his skin had grown dark. Their eyes met as he gave her a brief embrace.

  “My dear!” he said. “My dear.” Then he gestured to the arriving wagons. “I must—”

  “Of course,” Charlotte said. He dashed to greet the others and to tie up their mules.

  They gathered in front of the cabin for a brief prayer of thanksgiving; Charlotte counted only five other women and a scattering of children. They gave three cheers to the older man, who turned out to be Mr. Webb, the donor of the land. Webb was a solid, red-faced man with a large round nose, deeply cleft down the middle. Charlotte guessed him to be sixty or more. He was redolent with sweat from working the crosscut saw, and strings of white hair trailed out from under his hat, but he carried himself with a dignified air, like some Cincinnatus of the hills, and Charlotte could see why Turner had trusted him so soon and so completely. Then it was time to work—to unload the wagons, set up tents, divide the labors. “Women and children can sleep in this cabin tonight,” Turner said.

  A man in the crowd pointed to the white house at the end of the valley. “What about that place?”

  A glance passed between Turner and Webb. “That house is not part of our colony,” Turner replied. “It’s the original homestead and belongs to Mr. Webb and his son, Harp.”

  All eyes turned to the house for
a moment, as if Harp might step out of the door to be acknowledged. But Harp either remained inside or was elsewhere.

  “We have much to do before nightfall,” Turner said. “Let us begin.”

  He jumped down from the stump and led the way to the wagons, organizing the men into groups to set up a shelter and picket lines for the mules and horses, laying out piles of goods onto squares of canvas, and carrying other items inside the cabin.

  Cabot trotted up on his horse. Charlotte could see him eyeing the situation cautiously, unsure of where he fit in, and she walked over to him as he dismounted.

  “Here,” she said, taking his arm. “Come this way.” She led him to Turner. “This is the man I wrote you about,” she told her husband. “Adam Cabot.”

  The men shook hands. “You did indeed,” Turner said. “The man who cheated death. Mr. Cabot, you are welcome here, even though you are not among our adherents. Perhaps you will convert to our principles one day.”

  “Perhaps,” Cabot said, “and even if not, I am glad to work with you now. It heartens me to see men working toward a worthy goal.”

  “Men and women, you mean,” said Charlotte.

  Cabot blushed. “You are right.” He spoke to Turner again. “Your wife is an education in herself, sir. She has nearly converted me to your cause through conversation alone.”

  Turner smiled, the broad, embracing grin that Charlotte remembered and loved, which began as an ordinary smile then wrapped his face, warming the air for a yard around. “An education in herself!” he repeated. “An entire university, more like. I can see some grand conversation around the fireplace for the three of us.”

  Cabot smiled in return. “I—” He made a hesitant gesture. “Beyond my personal belongings, I brought nothing with me for your settlement, except—” They walked to Charlotte’s wagon. “Except this, and I don’t know what good it will do you.”