Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “You might set some men to gathering brush,” she said to Turner. “When this is finished we will need to burn this tent and everything in it.”

  Mercadier said something to Marie, who nodded, stepped forward and joined them.

  “This is what killed my mother, Mr. Turner,” she said. “This is the cholera.”

  November 1857/March 1858

  Chapter 8

  Wornall died later that night, his mumbled apology the last thing anyone heard from him. In the morning they burned the tent and all his clothes, saving only Wornall’s diary from the flames. The other men’s clothes and bedding went too.

  That first day Charlotte walked the fields alone while the bonfire blazed, sending a column of smelly gray smoke down the river valley. Her father’s dinner table lectures on earthworks, landforms, and drainage came in handy in an unexpected way. North from the village was the wide river bottom, fields and areas someday to be cleared for fields—too valuable to be used as a cemetery. But on the other side of the fields, several short hollows were tucked into the mountainside, facing east toward the morning sun, sloping but not too steep. She chose one that had a good stand of trees and could be seen from the settlement, not too long a walk but far enough away to feel quiet and alone. She picked Wornall’s spot and returned home to let the others know.

  By then Gus Roberts and Jesse Buford, two of the other men in the tent, were ill. Charlotte had to ignore her horror of the disease from then on. The luxury of drawing back in fear was no longer available; everyone simply had to do what was necessary, grit their teeth and point themselves forward. The other women tried to get her to stay away because of her condition, but of course there wasn’t time for that.

  A hurried search revealed that no one except George Webb had any calomel, or at least Webb was the only one to admit to having any.

  “Just as well,” Turner told her. “Saves us having to decide who would get it and who wouldn’t.”

  They set aside one of the cabins for a hospital and took turns caring for the sick men. Roberts was the worse off. Although he was a strapping young man, his size and strength gave him no advantage. They tried to cool him and to keep up with his maddening thirst, but after two days he died.

  Buford was alone in the cabin for only a day, when they brought in Lucy Wickman. From that time forward, Mrs. Wickman was there day and night, leaving only to fix meals and to spend time with her other daughter, Mary. Three days later, Mary joined her sister in the sick ward, and then more and more.

  Almost everyone who fell ill was from the lower side of the settlement, closer to the river, which caused some bad feeling. Talk flew around the village that it had been built too low, where the river fogs could enter the nearest houses and poison them with its bad air. But Cabot pointed out that the fogs from the river covered all parts of the settlement equally. And besides, there hadn’t been any fogs when the disease struck. Suspicion also fell upon the Mercadiers until someone remembered that Wornall had taken sick in the morning and the Frenchman and his daughter hadn’t arrived until afternoon, and then onto the Irish who had passed through earlier, but soon enough everyone stopped searching for causes or people to blame, and just tended to the sick and dying.

  With the fall had come the sickness and then the rain, weeks and weeks of rain, everyone confined indoors for long stretches. The river had risen alarmingly—it covered the main road and crested only a few feet from their front door. It was frightening that a river so placid and harmless-looking could become that relentless, carrying logs and posts and debris downstream in its swift grip. The Hudson Charlotte had grown up on was much larger, of course, but it seemed tranquil compared to the St. Francis. There was something almost animal in the speed of this river’s swelling. One of the sycamores on the bank gave way in the night, falling into the stream with a sodden crash that woke Charlotte in the dark.

  The sickness persisted into the winter. Buford lingered for more than a week. Although he had been the colony’s clown, with a stream of witticisms for every situation, he spent his last days possessed by an intense fear of hell, alternately praying and confessing his sins to anyone within earshot. Lucy Wickman died quickly but Mary hung on. Hess Shepherson, whose wife had just arrived at the colony the week before, fell ill on a Saturday and was dead by Monday.

  About half of the sick ones recovered and were sent back to their cabins, though many had to stay in bed for weeks afterward. Glendale Wilson, the fourth young man who had shared the tent with Wornall, Roberts, and Buford, never showed so much as a mild fever. He walked around the colony like a lonesome ghost, everyone’s eyes upon him and everyone avoiding his gaze.

  In the end, the last one ill was Mary Wickman. Charlotte spent time with her in the mornings, helping Mrs. Wickman with her cleanup and breakfast. When Mary was conscious, Charlotte read to her; but more often she just mopped her face and kept her warm as she murmured, semiconscious, in the soft light of December, her body under the blankets as frail as a bird’s, a strange contrast to the sturdy little form Charlotte had seen lugging pails of water for her mother.

  For two months the weekly meetings had been suspended because of the epidemic. The whole colony seemed to be sleepwalking. Those who were well came out in the mornings, found something to do, and worked at it as long as they felt like it. Christmas came and went with no celebration, only quiet greetings within a family or across a distance. But with the waning of the disease in early January, Turner called a meeting again, walking from house to house with the news.

  And at the meeting, Wickman was the first to speak. “I’d like permission from the community to bring my daughter home,” he said, his voice hoarse and nearly inaudible. “I know that’s not how you’re supposed to do it—supposed to wait till the last person either gets well or … you know … but I don’t think anybody else is getting sick. It’s been days, and I—I just want her home.”

  No one spoke. All eyes were cast down. “Hearing no objection,” Turner said after a minute, “the request is approved. We shall burn the cabin on the next favorable day.” Wickman walked out of the meeting into the dim evening light. Charlotte followed.

  He strode directly to the hospital cabin, where Mrs. Wickman sat nodding, reading her Bible beside Mary’s cot.

  “Run home and get her bed ready, Frances,” he said. “Time to go.” He glanced over his shoulder at Charlotte. “Can you gather up her things?”

  “Of course.”

  And so Mary Wickman went home in her father’s arms, shivering in her blankets, and was tucked into her own bed. But her body had grown rigid and her breath came in soft rasping gasps, and a few minutes later she was dead.

  Only then did Mrs. Wickman break down and cry. She had been strong all through Lucy’s decline and death, brushing away a few tears but keeping a smile for Mary. Now, though, she lay in the bed with her daughter, sobbing, with her body held over the girl as if to keep her warm, and her rough hand smoothing out the sweat-tangled mat of hair on the back of her head.

  Charlotte quietly laid on the table Mary’s few belongings—a rag doll, another blanket, a few extra clothes—and let herself out the door, as Wickman awkwardly stroked his wife’s heaving back.

  The next day was dry and windless. The men gathered in the morning with barrels of water drawn from the river to quench the sparks and lit a fire in the center of the cabin floor. Within fifteen minutes, the building was ablaze, flames licking out the front and back doors, the intense heat driving them all back except for Cabot and Glendale Wilson, who had been stationed on the roof of the house next door with buckets to protect its roof. Another fifteen minutes and the center beam collapsed, bringing the walls down with it and sending up a shower of ash and sparks that sent them all running to stamp out the tiny conflagrations in the weeds.

  And then it was full winter and she was due. Looking back on it, there was much Charlotte couldn’t remember of that time, and just as well. Her pains had been going on for a few days, but on a co
ld January afternoon she knew her time had come. A granny woman in French Mills had a reputation for being good with childbirth, so Turner was sent to fetch her—more to get him out of the house than anything else, she suspected. As afternoon moved into night, the pain got worse, and so did her fear, which doubled the pain. But the women of the colony gathered in the house, spoke to her calmly, and got her through her fear. Then it was just determination, or desperation, or a combination of the two. She was going to give birth or die, so she gave birth. By the time the old woman from French Mills arrived, it was mostly over. Thank God it had gone as well as it had. With the river so high, she could never have made it to Fredericktown for medical help, even if there had been any available.

  So now Charlotte and Turner had a son, and the town had a graveyard. The limestone slabs collected to build the Temple of Community were put to use as grave markers, squared off and chiseled with the names of the dead. The newest one had been dug a couple of weeks ago, its mound of red earth a bright gash in the fallen leaves on the hillside—the Cameron boy, kicked in the head by a mule. John Wesley Wickman, the clumsy one, the man who seemed inept at every task he was assigned, built a sturdy bench for his wife beside the graves of their daughters. It was Osage orange, impervious to the elements, and he had smoothed it to a polish and set it firmly into the rocky slope. Mrs. Wickman went up every morning for an hour. She would leave wildflowers, sprigs of bittersweet, bright buttons, and tiny handwritten notes, which she removed on the next visit and replaced with new things. And on a bright, oddly warm March afternoon,

  Charlotte found herself there as well, wrapped in her gray wool overcoat, sitting on Mrs. Wickman’s bench.

  Charlotte knew she should get back to the colony. There was a great deal of work to be done. But she just needed to get away. Surely not every minute had to be spent in toil and duty. It was probably more cabin fever than anything else, she told herself, but whatever it was, her need for time alone to think overpowered everything else at the moment.

  She had pulled her arms in from the sleeves of her overcoat, sitting on the bench, so that the heavy woolen coat sat like a tent around her. She felt a stir inside the coat and looked down through the collar opening. Young Newton, named after her father, was squirming in her arms. She thought he might want to nurse, but after a moment he turned over, puckered his lips as if pondering some deep thought, then relaxed again, still asleep.

  Charlotte sat for a while longer, until it really was time to get down the hill. She stood, and as she did, a flutter of color caught her notice out of the corner of her eye. She turned to see.

  It was a patch of Harp Webb’s hair that had come out from under his hat. He was sitting at the base of a tree about forty feet up the hill from her, his heavy canvas coat draped all the way to the ground, his rifle propped between his knees. Charlotte walked over to him.

  “Mr. Webb,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “Ma’am.” He touched his hat and got to his feet. “Feels good to stand up. I been holding that pose for three, four hours.”

  “Why?”

  He pointed across the hollow. “I seen some turkey sign on that slope a few days ago, thought I might put one in my bag. Then when you came along I figured the turkey wouldn’t show, so I decided to watch you instead.”

  “All this time?”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t have nothing else planned for today.”

  The idea of Webb sitting up the hill from her, watching her all this time, made Charlotte shudder. “You should announce your presence. Don’t you have anything better to do with yourself?”

  “You people are the ones with all the ambition. Me, I just sit and hunt the birds.”

  They came to the edge of the hollow and looked down at the colony. “Not that turkey hunting ain’t work of its own sort,” he said. “The trick to hunting is, you got to be willing and able to outwait your animal. He pointed to a groundhog hole at the base of a tree. “Now that critter, he will outwait a man. You got to catch him by surprise. But the other animals, you wait downwind long enough, and they will forget you. Then you got ‘em.”

  The path down to the village was little more than a trail, with weeds and sassafras sprouts growing in the wagon tracks.

  “You’re feeling philosophical today, Mr. Webb.”

  “Rally me all you want, ma’am. I do think a few thoughts from time to time. Even an ignorant border ruffian is entitled to a thought now and then.”

  “I’m sure that’s true.” She forced a smile.

  “Are you now.” He studied her face. “You might be surprised. Take for example, did you ever wonder why your property lines run at an angle up the river valley instead of straight north and south?”

  Charlotte was flustered. “No, I never really did.”

  “‘Cause it’s an old Spanish land grant, that’s why. The Spanish, they surveyed this valley first, and they just laid it out how they pleased. All that township and range stuff came later. My daddy bought this acreage from a man who had got it from the Spanish, way back when, who got it I guess from the Indians.” He paused. “You should read the deed sometime, it talks all about so many arpents this way and so many arpents that way. Bet you’ve never seen the corner markers.”

  “No.”

  He pointed. “Blaze on a black oak tree that way, rock piles that way and that way, big X painted on the bluff over yonder.”

  “You know this land pretty well.”

  “You’re damn right I do, beg your pardon. It would have been mine to inherit, till you people came along. And that ain’t the half of it. When my daddy parceled off this claim for you all, he split me off the part with the house and downriver. I go all the way up that mountain, down the other side about half way, then right angle across the river to about where you can see that outcrop. Then back across the river to the house.”

  Harp continued to talk as they walked toward the settlement. “‘Course, I ain’t built no town on it, no houses or barns or corncribs or what all. I ain’t got big ideas like my daddy and you all. But it’s mine all the same.”

  “Your father is quite a man.”

  “Oh yeah, one of the great men of the county, they say. Always reading his books, always talking about serving the greater good. He read your husband’s book over and over. Taught me to read, too, but I don’t care for it. I take my lessons at the feet of Mother Nature.”

  “And what did Mother Nature teach you?”

  Webb gave her an appraising look. “Most people only see what they want to see in nature. It ain’t easy to read the real lessons.” She waited for him to continue.

  “Eat. Struggle. Mate. Die,” he said. “Put off dying for as long as you can. Take pleasure where you can, for pleasures are always cut short. Defend your ground.”

  “And you had no mother of your own?”

  Webb shrugged, but his beard hid any expression. “Run off. She was from back East. The rustic life didn’t agree with her, I guess.”

  “What about the other lessons of nature? Beauty and cooperation?”

  They were halfway down the slope by now. Harp stopped and turned back toward the edge of the forest. “Oh yeah, some of the creatures cooperate. The lower creatures, the bees and the ants. And the wolves. I believe I’ll part from you here,” he said. “My father, he had two terms as judge, you know. Great believer in the common good, king of the ants. Didn’t none of it rub off on me. Me, I just sit under trees. I watch and wait.”

  From their vantage point on the hillside, they could see the entire valley, two miles from end to end. The colonists’ work of tree-cutting and stump removal was pushing the fields northward, into the bottomland forest, but there was still a great deal of ground to be cleared. The huddle of houses that made up Daybreak looked insignificant from up here, and the cleared fields little more than a small gap in the forest that surrounded them, forest that began just across the road and extended eastward into the distance, hill upon hill receding, the winter gray-brown
of the near woods growing bluer and paler as the hills backed away to the horizon, and forest behind her, the cemetery barely hacked out and constantly encroached upon by sprouts at every edge, forest that blanketed the hillslope and stretched westward behind her, how far God only knew.

  And at the south end of the valley was the original house, the Webbs’ house, fronting the main road, and behind it their barn and outbuildings. Tucked against the hillside was Harp’s odd collection of shacks and sheds, where he seemed to spend most of his days.

  “That’s quite a nest of buildings,” Charlotte said.

  “You should come and see sometime,” Harp said, a note of pride in his voice. “Took me two years to get ‘em the way I wanted.” He pointed with his rifle. “That one highest up is the springhouse. This near building, that’s my stillhouse, and the long one behind it is my saltpeter works. You ever seen saltpeter made?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, it’s the champion. Every so often I dig out a bunch of dirt from the cave and put it in some tubs. Then I just let the water drip through it, again and again, until I’ve got a good batch of liquid to boil off. Sometimes I’ll have two fires going, whiskey in the one house, saltpeter in the other. Tending a fire all day ain’t a half bad job.” Webb’s eyes darted to her overcoat, where Newton still slept in her arms. “Boy doing all right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “He takes to crying too much, you tell me and I’ll fix him up a little whiskey teat. I seen it done many a time. Everybody else wants their jug filled, I charge ‘em cash money, but for you, nothing.”

  “Thank you. I’ll let you know.”

  He turned and started to walk toward his still, following the curve of the hillside. Then he stopped and looked down at the colony again, his eyes sharp. Marie Mercadier was carrying an armload of stovewood into her house.

  “There’s a pretty young thing,” he said. “Bet every man in the settlement has his eye on her.”