He said nothing more and walked away. Charlotte watched him go, then walked slowly the rest of the way down the hill, Newton resting in his warm cocoon, her shadow long before her in the slanting light, shivering from what she told herself was the evening’s chill.
When she reached the house, she let herself in through the back door and tucked Newton into his cradle. Turner, Cabot, and George Webb were out front, seated around the table, talking about their weekly meeting while Turner scribbled tiny notes on a folded piece of paper.
“I tell you this, my friends,” Turner was telling the men. “It was easier to make decisions during the weeks when we shut down the meetings from the cholera. Just decide and go, not spend four hours arguing and then vote what you knew needed to happen in the first place.” They laughed.
“How many shirts and pants will we have for Grindstaff this week, Mrs. Turner?” Cabot said over his shoulder.
“A dozen of each, I would guess. I haven’t been around to collect them yet.”
Every week Grindstaff, who owned the general store in town, sent them bolts of cloth and a list of requests, and every week the women in the community cut and sewed until the orders were filled. The trip around the houses to collect the finished items had become one of Charlotte’s weekly tasks. Some of the money went toward their account at the store, while the rest went into the treasury.
“I’m grateful for every one of them, ma’am,” said Webb. “They certainly make my finance report more cheerful.”
“We all do our part,” said Charlotte.
“We’re on the good with Grindstaff. He’ll advance us seeds for the coming year,” Webb said. “But if we really want to move ahead, we need a McCormick reaper. Do the work of ten men.”
“Can we afford one?” Turner asked.
“If everyone stays. But if some people pull out and take their money with them…. “
“Have you heard anything?”
Cabot spoke. “Cantwell’s unhappy. Says if he had wanted to work like an animal, he would have stayed back East in the factory.”
“How much did he bring?”
Webb checked his books. “Three hundred and twenty dollars.”
“The thing is,” Cabot said, “He can influence others. He’s a talker, that Cantwell.”
“We’ve got a whole town full of talkers,” said Webb. “No shortage of big ideas.”
Charlotte stepped to the table and stood beside Turner. “We’re ready to start planting. Once there are green things coming up in rows all down the valley, our outlook will improve. You won’t hear as much complaining.” The men nodded. “Besides,” she added, “I thought the idea was to get off the whole treadmill of getting and spending. Debt and interest. Wages and competition.”
“Easier said than done,” replied Webb. “There are still taxes to pay and goods to buy. But we’ll make a fist of it yet.”
“If we get into a corner, I can always make another lecture tour,” said Turner. “We brought in high money from those, didn’t we?” He put his arm around Charlotte’s waist. Charlotte didn’t reply. “And there’s The Eagle. I’ll have another issue out by the first of February, I’ll wager. Which reminds me, this one will finish up my ink and paper. When I ride into town tomorrow, I’ll ask Grindstaff to order some more from St. Louis.”
A glance passed between Cabot and Webb. “Mind your expenses,” Webb said. “The Eagle is barely a paying proposition. More subscribers would be a help—especially the kind that pay in something besides wildcat money.”
“Oh, it’ll fly,” Turner said. “There is only one direction on my map, and that is straight ahead. McCormick reaper, you say?”
Newton was awake now and crying from the bedroom. Charlotte left the men and went to tend him; she needed to get out on her rounds anyway. She took him to the washtub to clean him up, put a fresh diaper on him from the stack beside the door, and rinsed off her hands in the wash water before tossing it out. Motherhood had left her feeling dirty most of the time—sneezed upon, snotted upon, dribbling and dribbled upon. She soon had him tucked back under her coat as she walked up the lane among the houses.
The colony was now up to nine married women, the Shepherson widow, and the Mercadier girl. Mrs. Wickman had sewed two pair of pants and two shirts; everyone else had done one of each, except Mrs. Cantwell, who had only managed a pair of pants. “Lucky to get that,” she said, her face pinched and half-angry. “Not enough that I have to do all our own housework, and then he makes me rub his feet for an hour every night.”
“They hurt,” called Cantwell from his bed. “I think there’s something wrong with them.”
“Well, thank you for this,” Charlotte said, folding the pants over her arm. She didn’t feel like listening to the Cantwells’ woes. She was still thinking of Turner’s offhand remark. Another lecture tour? And leave her home with the baby? Not that he did all that much to help with young Newton besides fly him around the room when he came in at evening time, but the idea of herself alone in Daybreak and him off, riding from city to city, getting banquets and hotel stays, seemed too unfair to tolerate.
By the time she got home, the front room had been cleared for the weekly meeting. Another reason to hurry and finish the Temple of Community—to get these packed sessions out of her house on Thursday nights. She paused outside the open door for a moment. There was barely room for all the men to stand; Turner stood on an overturned box. A few men even were pushed into the bedroom doorway.
A voice came from the shadow of the maple tree in the front yard. It was Adam Cabot’s. “Quite a throng, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. She walked over to him. “More than a two-room cabin can easily hold.”
“That’s what happens with big ideas,” he said. “They grow quicker than our ability to contain them.”
“Do you think that is happening here?”
Cabot sighed deeply and watched the milling group in the lamplight. “I am in no place to judge,” he said. “Becoming the prisoner of great ideas is something of my specialty.”
“And have you embraced our great idea? You’ve thrown yourself into our work with the zeal of an enthusiast.”
He turned to face her, with a disconcerting force in his gaze. “There is no monument, no symphony, that speaks more to human possibility than a group of men and women gathered to elevate the race. A sacred task is in the undertaking here.”
His intensity took her aback for a moment. “You sound like my husband.”
Cabot bowed slightly toward her. “No finer compliment, Mrs. Turner.”
She took his arm as they walked to the house. “Call me Charlotte, please. We are friends, and I hope we shall be friends forever. And I noticed that you didn’t answer my question.”
Charlotte left him at the door and went around to come in through the back. She dragged her slat-back rocker out of the front to give the settlers more room and settled in it with Newton.
When the time came for the domestic manufacture report, she stood up and delivered it over the heads of the men crowded in the doorway. How many shirts and pants were made this week; how the stores of flour, salt, and meal were holding up; what kinds of supplies needed to be brought back from town. Mrs. Cameron had requested some yards of black cloth to make a mourning dress. The last time Charlotte had brought such a request, for Mrs. Wickman back in November, someone had questioned the expense, and a fistfight nearly broke out. This time the group meekly voted its approval.
Then two hours went by in debate over the tasks for the coming week. Whether it was too early to plant. Whether it was wise to buy a McCormick reaper. How much of the valley should be planted in wheat and how much in corn. Where they should mill it, and how much they could expect for their excess. The talk went on and on, everyone chiming in, until at the end they voted to buy the reaper. The fields were still too wet for planting, so Turner announced they would be spending the week in repairs and inside work. A few men would fell trees, and others saw planks; th
ey had voted last week that it was time to cover the log walls of their homes with clapboards. Charlotte dozed off and was only awakened by the sound of the men putting the furniture back in place and shouting good-nights in the chill air.
An hour later, just before bedtime, there was a quiet knock at the front door. The first knock was so quiet that Charlotte thought she had imagined it; the second a little louder.
On the stepstone was a small, slender man in a long overcoat, his face long and narrow, an attempt at a beard shadowing his face. When Charlotte opened the door, he removed his hat and placed it over his heart, inclining his head a bit too dramatically.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I wish to speak with Mr. Turner.”
By now Turner was behind her. “As I live and breathe,” he said. “Mr. Hildebrand.”
The same.
“I heard no horses,” Charlotte said, looking over his shoulder into the darkness. Seeing nothing, she returned her attention to the man. His voice was soft and lilting, and he seemed to have a balance about him, like an acrobat or rope walker; but somehow he also seemed curiously rooted, as though nothing could move him off the doorstone if he didn’t want to.
“I avoid the roads, ma’am. There are those who would quarrel with me if they knew I was about, and I always avoid a quarrel.”
Turner stepped in front of her. “I forget my manners. Charlotte, this is Mr. Sam Hildebrand. Mr. Hildebrand, my wife.”
Hildebrand bowed again.
“I have heard of you,” Charlotte said.
Hildebrand’s glance flicked upon her and then went elsewhere. “Mr. Turner, may I have a word.”
“Certainly.” Turner stepped aside and held the door open. “Outside, if you don’t mind.”
Turner and Charlotte exchanged a moment’s worried look, but the request seemed polite enough. He took his coat off the door hook. “Certainly.” They stepped outside and stood beneath the maple tree in front of the house.
Charlotte pushed the door to, but not all the way, and from inside she watched the two men converse. Hildebrand bent his head near Turner’s ear; the two kept their gazes away from each other. The night was clear, with a quarter moon just rising in the trees across the river.
They spoke for several minutes. At one time she saw a gesture pass between them—Hildebrand offering something, James accepting? She couldn’t quite tell.
Then whatever it was, was over, and he came back inside. Hildebrand melted into the dark.
“So?” she said.
“He and two of his brothers wanted to sleep in our barn. They’re heading to Arkansas.” He held out his hand and dropped two small gold coins, tinkling onto the table. “And they gave us two dollars for the privilege.”
Blowing out the lamps, they eyed each other with mutual curiosity and doubt. They undressed and climbed into bed. “Won’t they freeze out there?”
Turner chuckled. “I doubt it. Three horses and four men, all in a nice bed of hay—”
He stopped, but too late.
“Wait. Four men? And only three horses? That doesn’t make sense.”
He wiped his hand across his face, a gesture he always made when embarrassed. “I didn’t want to tell you. They’ve captured an escaped slave, and they’re taking him back to Arkansas for the reward.”
“What a disgusting business. I can see why you didn’t want to tell me.”
“I know. But it’s cash on the barrelhead. The colony needs money.”
“Perhaps we should get into the slave-catching business ourselves, then. They probably just stole a man to take down South somewhere.”
“Let’s not quarrel over this.”
“James. I know we need the money. But some dollars are not worth earning.”
“He said they’d be gone before first light. They know that plenty of people here are in the anti-slavery camp, and don’t want any arguments.”
“I’ve a mind to go out there and start one myself.” But she knew she wouldn’t. The deed was done; these men were going to sleep in the barn whether she liked it or not.
It was late in the night when Newton woke her, crying, wanting to nurse. She had hoped to get him to sleep through the night by now, but it was still an uncertain matter. Charlotte felt her way through the pitch-dark front room to the rocking chair and fed him there.
The whole day sat uneasy on her mind. Harp Webb in the cemetery. James thinking about a tour. And now this business with Hildebrand. Ever since Newton was born, she had felt a deep sense of dread come over her from time to time, a feeling that the world was bearing down on her too heavily. That feeling hovered over her all the time, and days like this only redoubled it. Dealing with slave-catchers! And dangerous ones at that. It was not so much that James had done it as that he had done it without talking to anyone and seemed so indifferent to the moral slope of the matter.
Perhaps she was just too touchy about the whole issue. Growing up in New York, she’d never had to think about slavery. Slaveholders were distant people, easily dismissed as greedy plantation types. Even here there weren’t many slaves, a few house servants here and there, people you could imagine almost as family servants, not owned property. But to assist these people, to give them shelter? Of course, what could you do? When someone came along it would be uncharitable to deny them a place to sleep at night.
While she was thinking, Newton finished nursing and fell asleep. She tucked him into his cradle and piled the blankets over him. A warm night for March was still March.
She wasn’t ready to go back to sleep yet. Turner was snoring peacefully under the covers. Charlotte put on her wool coat and a pair of slippers and stepped out the back door.
The sky was a rich carpet of stars, with the quarter moon now about to drop behind the hill. She marked the familiar constellations—Orion, the Seven Sisters, the two dippers, reclining Cassiopeia in her giant W—that stretched out over the valley. The night was still, and a faint smell of wood smoke hung in the air.
A rustle of horses stopped her breathing and made her shrink into the doorway. The sound came from the barn. At least Hildebrand was being true to his word and getting out before daylight. Before anyone awoke, they would be through French Mills and into the deep woods, down the diminishing wagon track toward Arkansas, the ill-traveled road that few travelers used or even knew about.
She heard the creak of saddles, the clinking of bits. Then the sound of three horses walking slowly down the lane toward the main road, hoofbeats quiet and unhurried, no words spoken. They were nothing more than apparitions, silent ghosts passing the house. If she hadn’t known about them, she would have doubted their existence.
As the riders passed the cabin, one last sliver of moonlight caught them before they faded into the trees. Charlotte watched them enter and then leave the faint shaft of light—one man riding, then a second and a third, and behind the third a man walking, his hands folded in front of himself at his waist as if in prayer, although as he passed into the light Charlotte could see that his hands were tied, with the rope attached to the saddle horn of the third rider.
The man looked back over his shoulder at the moon. Then he slipped into darkness, and all that Charlotte was left with was a glimpse of a round cheek, a shining eye, and a black face.
April 1858
Chapter 9
The longer Cabot stayed in Daybreak, the more he felt like a true inhabitant and less like a refugee. His fellow citizens were simple people, mostly, with little to brag about in their lives, and this venture was the greatest deed they had ever undertaken. When Cabot arrived in the community, it was of less consequence to him, a young, single, educated man who would someday come into a bit of an inheritance, than it was to the family men, for whom Daybreak was an ultimate gamble. He grew to admire them, chasing their ideals into this river valley. The simplicity of their aims, and their single-mindedness in pursuing them, refreshed his faith after the disaster of Kansas. Perhaps Turner had been right all along, and the way to change the world w
as to change a tiny piece of it, to let the rest of the world watch and emulate. He often thought about Charlotte’s question to him from earlier in the spring: Had he embraced their idea? Not entirely. But it was good to be out here in the bosom of nature, to see God face to face, as Mr. Emerson put it. And with a fine woman like Charlotte Turner to converse with in the afternoons, what better place was there to be?
With the coming of spring they had begun holding their meetings in the shell of the Temple of Community, seated on boxes or folded blankets. The walls were about three feet high now that Prentice and Wilson were working full time on them. They made a good pair. Prentice, the teamster from Ste. Genevieve, always good-humored but not particularly bright, lightened the dour mood of Wilson, who had still not gotten over being the only cholera survivor among the four men of his tent. The two men, self-appointed stonemasons, had begun the window openings and spent the day walking from place to place, stone in hand, looking for the right fit. The larger space meant that the women could now attend.
Turner always took on something of the lecture platform when he led the meetings. Cabot had to admit that performance was his gift. With good material and time, he could always move an audience toward himself, talk them through an idea or banter his way past an objector.
It was the first really warm evening of spring, a sign of warmer weather to come. Cabot strolled from his cabin toward the Temple site, enjoying the cool sun. Turner was waiting for him by a tree, a couple of dozen yards from the wall.
“May I have a word?” Turner said.
They walked a short distance down the road.
“This man Cantwell,” Turner began.
Cabot nodded. Nothing further needed to be said. Cantwell, the great malfeasant, the complainer and slow worker who was never in harmony with the others, always raising objections, never producing his share. He claimed to be ill most of the time but looked suspiciously healthy.
“I hear he’s planning to resign the community tonight,” Turner said.
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