Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “Not even me. He says he has a strongbox, or maybe more than one, and he is confident they are safe and secure.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “I hope he knows what he is doing.”

  “He’s made it this far.”

  They could see the colony through the trees now. Charlotte stopped and kissed him again, before they got into sight of everyone.

  “If you have to go on another tour, you have to go. But you know I’ll miss you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “I’m thinking of a quick round to the north. Now that the railroad’s made it to Pilot Knob, I could board a train there, do St. Louis, Independence, St. Joseph. Then back to Quincy, Galesburg, maybe Burlington or Davenport, on into the northern cities, maybe even Wisconsin. Then home again. One lecture per town, one day to set up, one day to leave. The take would be smaller, but there would be less time and expense for travel.”

  “That doesn’t leave you time to get handbills printed.”

  “I’ll print them here and send them ahead. I can do it in the late summer, before the harvest. They’ll need me here for the harvest.”

  “You know.…” They stopped again.

  “Yes?”

  Her look was friendly yet challenging, full in his face. “If you really want this community to strike a blow for the equality of mankind, you’d let women vote.”

  He stopped the jest that was about to pop from his lips. He knew she wasn’t joking.

  They gazed at each other, not speaking. Of course she was right. And yet, the idea of proposing this to the colony, the ridicule, the dissension—he could not let himself suggest an idea that would be voted down. The cost to his leadership would be too great.

  “You know—” he began.

  “Yes. I know.” She didn’t let her gaze drop. “And you know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  The sun was full overhead now, and with that the air was quickly warming. As they walked up the lane, they could hear children playing between the houses and down by the river.

  Turner felt a surge of warmth as they reached the village. He knew that some of his good feeling was just the happiness of a man after refreshment, but he liked to think there was more to it than that. He felt almost fatherly as he watched the children running and smelled the sweet, smoky tang of ham frying in someone’s house. The community—his community—was going to flourish. He could just feel it. All they had to do was find a way to become self-supporting.

  When they reached Mercadier’s house, it was empty. Marie must have taken Newton out to play, he supposed. So they walked further into the settlement. Mrs. Wickman sat in her doorstep, still dressed in her mourning black. No one could muster the courage to tell her to move on, change back into her ordinary dress, start her ordinary life again. They stopped to talk.

  “You’re a couple of sprites, out in the woodland,” Mrs. Wickman said. Her body in its heavy black dress was thick and solid in the spring light.

  “The flowers are in bloom,” Turner said. “You should come see.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen ‘em,” she said. “Took my walk up the valley.” She inclined her head toward the cemetery. “Don’t know their names though. I’m a city girl; only thing we ever saw growing was dandelions.”

  “Your husband seems to know them all.”

  “He’s a studying man, that man. Him and his books, reads till the lamp is out every night.” She gave them an appraising look. “You two are the booky types too, I’d say.”

  “I guess you’re right about that,” Charlotte said.

  “No harm in it, I suppose.” Her face went back to the habitual expression, distracted and lost, that she had worn ever since the girls died.

  “Well. Good day to you.” Turner tipped his hat and they walked on.

  “Oh yes,” Mrs. Wickman said. “Someone’s at your house.”

  A big black gelding was tied up outside, its saddle off and propped against the house. Turner did not recognize it.

  Inside, Marie was distractedly playing with Newton, but her face was uncomfortable and worried. At the table sat Emile, stiff, with a look of even greater discomfort.

  And in the chair, still wearing his military overcoat, his hands jammed into his pockets, looking most miserable of all, was Charlotte’s father. He stood up and spoke as soon as they entered.

  “I’ve come to tell you that your mother has died.”

  April/July 1858

  Chapter 10

  Charlotte threw herself into her father’s arms, tears filling her eyes. She had always prided herself on her ability to keep things together, to keep herself under control, but this news had just come from out of the sky and knocked her down.

  She wiped her cheeks and pulled back from her father a little. He looked older than he should. Had it really been less than a year since she had last seen him? His face was tired, and his overcoat seemed a size too big. His hair, which even in its best times was an uncombed mass of black and gray, seemed longer and more unkempt than ever.

  “You came all this way,” she said.

  “Didn’t want to send a letter. Besides, the Army seems to need my services less and less these days. Might as well get on a train and see the sights. See my little namesake.” He smiled.

  Turner was still standing by the door. Now he stepped forward and shook hands with Carr. “You’ve met the Mercadiers, I take it,” he said.

  “Yes. They were kind enough to let me sit inside till you came home.”

  The Mercadiers took this as their cue and excused themselves, and for a while the three were silent, watching Newton burrow into his mother’s arms.

  “What happened?” Charlotte said quietly.

  Carr shrugged. “She just faded and faded. Only ate milk and toast. One day I came home and she said she had seen Caroline.” This last sentence cost him a moment’s composure; his face contorted and he rubbed his eyes. Then he went on. “Just her mind going, I’m sure. But she was so happy to have seen her that

  I thought perhaps Caroline really had appeared to her. Ghost or apparition or something. After that, she talked to Caroline almost every day, upstairs, in your bedroom or in the hallway.”

  She laid her hand on his sleeve. “Did you ever see Caroline?”

  His eyes filled with tears again. “I wish I had! Then I would know something of this world. Instead of—”

  “Here,” she said, rising. “Get your coat off. When did you last eat?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m an old soldier.” But he readily obeyed, and in no time they were tucking into pork chops and some of the remaining potatoes from last year’s crop, pulled from the cellar box, a little sprouty but still good at the center. It was good to be up and moving around—activity brought relief, although Charlotte felt dulled by the blow; she looked at her hands and they seemed like the hands of someone else.

  “You say the Army didn’t mind you going?” Turner asked him.

  “Mind? They were delighted. Too many officers. We cost too much. So I’m on indefinite furlough.”

  By the end of the meal they had settled matters. The cholera had left plenty of empty beds in the community; Carr would bunk with some of the younger men and stay as long as he wanted, not as an applicant for membership, but as a working guest. Turner seemed happy to have him, and Charlotte had not realized how much she had missed her father until she had him near again.

  In the morning Turner took her father out to walk the grounds. Charlotte felt warm with pride as she stood in the doorway and watched her two men stroll up the lane, greeting and being greeted, Turner gesturing with relaxed confidence and Carr pausing, listening, nodding. When they reached the Temple of Community, they circled it several times, Carr testing the walls here and there and sighting down them to check for plumb. She knew Turner was deliberately distracting him from his grief and was grateful. But her own grief was just beginning to make itself felt. Yesterday’s shock had given way to simp
le pain, not a complicated feeling, just a plain sadness that gnawed at her under her breastbone and would not go away.

  As she watched them, she heard a sound behind her and turned around to see Adam Cabot walking up the road from the south. He tipped his hat to her, then looked at her with an odd expression.

  “Charlotte, are you well?”

  She passed her hand over her hair. In a moment the whole story was out, her father’s arrival, the dreadful news, his plans to stay on. And her tears returned.

  He took both of her hands in his. “I’m so very sorry. Please accept my condolences.”

  “I hardly know what to say. Thank you.”

  Cabot smiled. “No, I’m the one who’s supposed to not know what to say. You’re the one who’s supposed to be gracious and wise.” This brought a smile from her at last. “Yes, just like that.”

  “I assure you, I’m feeling neither gracious nor wise.”

  “Your father didn’t come all the way out here just to tell you this news. Surely you see that.”

  She had, in fact, not thought about that until this moment. “I suppose you’re right. He knew I would need to have him near.”

  He squeezed her hands. “Try again, dear. Granted, you need him. But he needs even more to have you close by. That’s why he’s here.”

  After he said it, it made sense. Her father had not been alone for nearly three decades. She looked up the lane at them; they had finished their examination of the Temple and were heading toward the fields. They looked back and waved.

  Cabot released her hands with an embarrassed expression. “I should get up there,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” Charlotte said. “Come in for breakfast. I hear Newton stirring.”

  “Thank you. But I’ve eaten.”

  “You have? And out for a walk already too? I hardly knew you for such a morning bird.” In a teasing voice, she added, “I might think you have a sweetheart down in French Mills you’re going to see. What say you, Mr. Cabot? Is there a motive for your morning stroll?”

  Cabot blushed crimson and turned his head away. “No such thing.”

  She thought about teasing him further, but his blush was so deep she held back.

  “The fact is,” Cabot said after a moment, “I am undertaking a new regime for my self-improvement. The Hindus believe in a morning river bath as a religious exercise.”

  The statement sounded so absurd, and Cabot looked so simultaneously sheepish and defensive, that she burst out in a laugh despite herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just never imagined you in a turban.”

  “That’s the Sikhs,” he said peevishly. “The Hindus are—oh, never mind.” He glanced up the lane. “Please—”

  “Of course. I never tattle on my friends.”

  She watched him walk back to his cabin. An interesting man, full of surprises, she thought. She remembered the first time they had met, when he was covered with tar but still extended his hand politely—such a curious mixture of thoughtfulness and resolution. What went on in his mind? She was never entirely sure. And here he was, practicing Eastern religion out in the woods! An interesting man indeed. A good match for Marie Mercadier. Of all the men in the colony, why did he have to be the shy one? She had never seen him so much as try to talk to Marie in the evenings or visit their house on Sundays. She wondered what it was Adam really wanted.

  But by now young Newton was fully awake, and it was time to stop wondering about Adam Cabot and move on to the rest of the day.

  Cabot had been reading the Bhagavad-Gita for several weeks, but he still couldn’t manage the emptiness of thought that was supposed to come to him over time. Instead of emptying out, his mind kept filling up with new concerns. He had re-read Mr. Emerson again as well, trying to gain an original relation with the universe by immersion in nature. He sat on a rock beside the river, and he climbed to the top of the ridge that shadowed their settlement on the west to await the first rays of dawn, but when he went to nature the only thing revealed to him was more nature. Not that the intricacies of leaves and the ripples of water weren’t interesting, but he had been hoping for something transcendent, some sign that there was harmony to be found beneath all this murder and mess. In their isolated valley, news didn’t arrive daily; it came every week or two, in gobbets of strife and dischord from Kansas, the South, everywhere.

  Today he had sat on his rock at the river while thoughts rushed noisily in and out of his head like passengers through a train station, each of them intent, directed, but interfering with the others, jostling and shoving, giving him the sensation of aimless disorder. He should rejoin the fight in Kansas. He should return to Boston and enlist with Mr. Garrison again. He should stay in Daybreak and make a go of this way of life, build an example for the rest of the country. He should call it quits, find a wife, and start living like everyone else.

  That was his problem—he wanted it all, to be contemplative and to be involved, to live in the eternal and be in the now. Or, he supposed, he didn’t know what he wanted at all.

  From where he sat he could see upriver and down, a good vantage point, and downriver through the trees he could see the shapes of two men coming up the road on foot, their forms obscured by the thick screen of vegetation. He fought back the panic that had gripped him in unfamiliar situations ever since Kansas and forced himself to remember that not every stranger in the woods was a threat. But as they drew closer he realized it was Turner and Captain Carr, back from hunting, rifles under their arms and a bloody bag held between them. He rose from his cross-legged squat and pushed through the underbrush to the road.

  “Looks as though you two have had some luck,” he said as Carr lowered the bag with a grunt.

  “Luck doesn’t enter into it,” Carr said. “This man’s a fine shot. We’ll have a good bit of hasenpfeffer to throw in the pot tonight.”

  “Mr. Turner, you are a frequent surprise.”

  Turner grinned and blushed, but was clearly pleased by the praise. “I picked up a few talents as a boy.”

  “Do you shoot, Mr. Cabot?” asked Carr.

  “Our family went on hunts occasionally, but I’m afraid I was the conscientious objector.”

  “Pity, it’s a useful skill. Not in the law office, but certainly out here. Most of what I learned from the military manual applies, except I doubt if I’ll need to take a defensive posture against a rabbit.”

  Cabot didn’t reply. The men’s rifles were military carbines, not the muzzle-loaders that were common around here. He’d seen enough of those weapons to last him.

  Carr anticipated his thoughts. “It’s a useful skill, but not everyone has to possess it. The world needs its conscientious objectors as well.”

  “Does it?” Cabot said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Carr. “We saw in Kansas what happens when violence becomes a habit. You know that more than most. I don’t know what we’re coming to.”

  His gloomy words gave them all pause. There seemed nothing else to say. Carr lifted his corner of the sack. “Well, let’s get these skinned,” he said, and the two men continued up the road, leaving a bloody spot in the dust.

  Cabot watched them leave and found himself wishing he could be more like James Turner. Author, speaker, town founder, crack shot. Judging by the man’s size, probably a champion wrestler as well. Was there nothing the man couldn’t do? On top of it all, he was married to Charlotte who, although Cabot was loath to admit it, increasingly occupied his thoughts. He didn’t want to think about Charlotte and he didn’t want to be envious of Turner, but there it was.

  What he needed, Cabot thought, was something to occupy his mind with the same passion. The Kansas fight had done that for him; but here in the Missouri woods he felt himself to be marking time. And marking time was courting trouble.

  Charlotte looked at the bag of dead rabbits on her back step and turned away abruptly. The newspapers were full of stories about violence and killing, threats of war, the uncertain future. The men talked endlessly about natio
nal honor and states’ rights. And who was she? She was the woman, like all women, left to raise the children and cook the meals while all this high talk carried on.

  She drew some water from the rain barrel and rinsed off the bodies. Good enough, they could be fried or thrown into a stew. But something disgusted her about the bloody little corpses, so eerily human with their heads and skin removed. She left them in the pan of water and stepped outside.

  Charlotte had left Newton with the Wickmans to give herself a few hours of peace on a Sunday afternoon, but now she felt an overwhelming need to have him back. He could have wandered off and fallen into the river.

  She wiped her hands on her apron as she walked. Did it have to be so difficult to keep anything clean? Dirt streets, dirty people, dirt everywhere.

  She knew she was walking fast but hoped it didn’t look like she was running. It felt like running, though, and she tried to put a smile on her face as she passed cabins, people, children, homes. She couldn’t pay attention to them. She just needed to see Newton. She shouldn’t have trusted Mrs. Wickman.

  Charlotte made it to the Wickman house and walked in without knocking. John Wesley Wickman was sitting with a book in a rocking chair by the open door, a tiny pair of reading glasses on his nose. He looked up and smiled as Charlotte entered; she brushed back her hair and tried to say something but could not.

  Mrs. Wickman was at the table by the stove, chopping potatoes. She wore

  an apron over a short sleeved dress, and her broad upper arms bulged out from the sleeves, pale as the potatoes themselves.

  “Hello, dear,” she said.

  “Where’s Newton?”

  Mrs. Wickman tilted her head to one side and looked at her feet. “Down here,” she said.

  Charlotte looked under the table, and there he was, in his dress and diaper, pulling himself up onto Mrs. Wickman’s skirts.

  “He’s become quite the crawler,” Mrs. Wickman said. “Another couple of months and you’ll be chasing him all over town.”