Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  Charlotte got down on her hands and knees and pulled him out, holding him to her face. She inhaled his scent.

  “I’m sorry for barging in, I just—” She couldn’t think of what else to say and sat down in their armchair. She buried her face in his tiny belly. Newton gurgled with pleasure and took handfuls of her hair.

  Neither of the Wickmans spoke. Charlotte bent over and rested Newton on her thighs, still with her face pressed against his white cotton dress. He squirmed, his knees bumping against her chin.

  She was not going to cry, she knew that. But what was she going to do? She couldn’t sit like that forever. She wanted to shout, run, stay, laugh, weep, curse. She held her face close and breathed.

  After a few minutes she pulled her face away and looked at Newton. His eyes roamed over her face, and his lips formed a smile. She smiled back.

  “I just got afraid,” she said.

  A look passed between Mr. Wickman and his wife.

  “I know the feeling,” he said.

  In the weeks and months that followed, Charlotte’s moments of nameless fear returned occasionally, unexpectedly, with the same debilitating effects. Mrs. Wickman stopped by one morning to tell her quietly that such spells were not uncommon among new mothers. “Just hold on, they’ll pass,” she said.

  Her advice was no help during those moments, though, and Charlotte found the best thing to do was lie down if she could, and if not, to get Newton close and hold him there, an act with which Newton sometimes cooperated and sometimes did not.

  Her father continued working with the masons, and in a great piece of luck, a German carpenter named Schnack drifted into the community from Cincinnati just as they were planning the roof for the Temple. Carr let him take over and moved on to the excavation for their barn, a real barn with a stone foundation, not the log structure they had thrown up last year.

  The week after the roof of the Temple was finished, there was a hard argument at the community meeting over whether to put windows in it. There was enough money to buy windows for the Temple, but not enough to put windows in all the houses yet. The men voted to finish the Temple, even though the women complained that the oilcloth and crude shutters over the window openings of the houses left them open to insects in the summer and drafts in the winter. “We’ll get to the houses as soon as we can,” Turner said in an effort to quiet the grumbling. “The Temple serves us all.”

  “So does being able to sew without getting frostbite,” Mrs. Wickman said.

  Turner kept his promise and brought Marie Mercadier in to help him with The Eagle on the days when her father was in town. She proved adept at the job, learning the typecase quickly, and had a sharp eye for proof. Now and then Charlotte took work out to the shed in the warm afternoons to keep them company, Newton at their feet while they worked and talked.

  Shepherson’s widow, who had only been in Daybreak a few days before her husband died of the cholera, decided to stay, having nowhere else to go, and was soon being addressed respectfully by several of the single men at lunch and after the weekly meetings. And as spring warmed toward summer, Charlotte’s moments of panic abated, as Mrs. Wickman had promised.

  Then it was time to plan Turner’s lecture tour. Charlotte had always been the scheduler; she sent off for a train timetable and plotted the route. He could go east and west without much problem, but north-south lines were few. Eventually she worked it out so that he could make twelve cities in twenty days, assuming the trains were all running, which of course could not be assumed; so they built in another five days of travel time and began writing to reserve churches and lecture halls. Charlotte feared the loneliness that she knew would haunt her while he was gone, but they could see no way around it. The colony needed money. Turner seemed excited by the prospect of making another circuit, exercising his talents, and his excitement only added a spoonful of resentment to her dread.

  One Sunday in late July, Charlotte went out while Turner polished his lecture. She took the rifle with her; if James was going to be off chasing dollars for the colony, she might as well practice bringing home squirrels. She walked behind the barn to the edge of the woods and remembered Harp Webb’s words about sitting in wait. Perhaps the art of hunting was not in pursuit, but in patience. She put a cartridge in the chamber and sat on the remains of a chest of drawers that had not survived the trip to the colony and was being dismantled for kindling, board by board. The sunlight felt good on her back. She took a deep breath and set in to wait.

  As she sat she could feel the familiar anxieties return, her husband’s approaching departure, death all around, the clouds of hateful talk from hateful men that swirled through the newspapers. A cold knot of dread formed in her chest. She tried to push it down, keep it from rising up to her throat, where it would tighten and freeze. A movement in the field a dozen yards away caught her eye.

  It was a rabbit that had twitched its ear, a tiny motion, but enough to be noticed. Charlotte had no idea how long it had been sitting there, frozen, hidden, fearful.

  It was sitting in profile to her, one big eye visible on the side of its head, its ears taut and high. She was probably too far away for it to see her clearly now—she had heard they had bad eyesight—but she knew it was listening, straining to hear whether the unknown threat had gone away. Its coat was the color of the dead underlayer of grass in the pasture, and if it had not made its tiny movement she would never have seen it.

  She swung the barrel of the rifle toward it and took a bead, first fixing the back sight and then raising the front as her father had taught her. She paused for a moment at the sight of the rabbit’s huge, frightened eye at the end of her view. The thought flitted through her mind that sometimes she was just like the rabbit, paralyzed with a nameless dread of a threat too vague even to be pictured.

  Then she squeezed the trigger, and the rabbit’s head disappeared.

  August 1858

  Chapter 11

  Turner stood beneath the pulpit of the Congregational Church in Quincy, Illinois, shaking hands and answering questions. It had been a good night for the tour. The church had been nearly full, at twenty-five cents a head, and he had sold several subscriptions to The Eagle on top of that. Things had picked up since he crossed the river. The Missouri crowds had been lackluster—he was too close to home to be interesting, he supposed—but Alton, Springfield, Jacksonville, all had excellent turnouts, and tonight was the best yet. From here he would hit Galesburg, Peoria, and farther north.

  An older man in a black frock coat stepped up to take his hand. “Most interesting, young man. I am Hiram Foltz of this city.”

  “Pleased to meet you, sir. Thank you for coming.”

  “May I ask—”

  “Certainly.”

  “Your settlement. It is founded on principles of equality and sharing, all things in common. But yet—I do not seek to offend—but yet you live among those for whom human beings themselves are nothing more than property.”

  It was a common enough question. “That is true. We hope to be an example for those around us, a demonstration that life can be lived on other principles.”

  “In other words, if I walk among murderers and thieves, my moral obligation is simply to avoid being a murderer and thief myself so that they may profit by my example.”

  Turner blushed. “Well said, sir.”

  Foltz frowned. “I don’t concern myself with rhetorical points. Will you walk with me a short way? I wish to talk further.”

  It was a warm night and just dusk, so Turner agreed. They stepped outside the church. The air was heavy with a number of different smells, all of them unpleasant. Foltz’s frown wrinkled a bit more.

  “A breeze would be good, or a rain,” he said. “But I believe neither is in store.”

  They walked toward the Mississippi, a few blocks to the west. Most of the merchants had laid plank sidewalks in front of their buildings, but occasionally they had to drop down to street level. Foltz had a crooked leg and used a cane; he noti
ced Turner’s glance.

  “Fifteen years ago, I was part of the Missionary Institute at the east end of town,” he said. “We were all Lane Seminary boys, radicals to a man. We would get a buggy and a fast horse, cross at the ferry here after dark, and ride into Missouri. See if we could find a slave or two, load them up, return here by daylight. If you could get them as far as Peoria or Springfield, you were safe. The trail would be cold, and the Missourians didn’t like going that far into free soil. One night, someone spotted me crossing the river, and by the time I got to Palmyra there was a crowd waiting,” he continued. “That’s where this limp comes from.”

  They had reached the front street and stood on the boardwalk, looking at the packed brown dirt that sloped to the river. A couple of steamers were tied up at docks, and a half dozen skiffs were scattered along the bank.

  “Fugitive Slave Law put an end to all those adventures,” Foltz said. “Now I’m a mere businessman.” He pointed down the street with his cane. “That’s my cigar factory just past the slaughterhouse. Horrible smell but the money is good.”

  “So after fifteen years of your effort—”

  “Yes. Things are no better. Actually worse. Every day of my life, men send their slaves over here with loads of tobacco or bills to collect, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it.”

  They walked upriver a block and then turned back toward the center of the city. A couple of whores standing in the entrance of a building stepped out of the shadows toward them. One was tall and fair-haired, a bit like Charlotte in her shape, although her face was unpleasantly painted. Covering a scar, perhaps? Turner couldn’t tell in the dim light. The other was short and dark, plump, with a round face. The women retreated under Foltz’s glare.

  “What hotel are you in?” Foltz said.

  They were at the town square, where light from taverns and hotel parlors cast slanting patterns of shadows across the streets and into the common. Turner pointed across the square at a three-story brick building. “Miller’s.”

  “Nice enough,” Foltz said. “I’d offer you my guest room, but unfortunately I have a new son-in-law in residence at the moment.”

  Two farmers had brought their cattle to the slaughterhouse and were trying to bed down their herds at opposite corners of the square. One cow was sleeping in front of the door to the city hall, and the men had to step into the street to go around it.

  “If you make use of the services of one of those ladies, make sure you go to your room, not theirs,” Foltz said. “Most of them will have a panel thief in the next room. And whatever you do, don’t fall asleep until after they’ve gone. More than one man has stepped out here in the morning with nothing but his socks.”

  “I’m a married man, sir,” Turner said.

  “These cribbers would starve if not for married men,” Foltz said with an appraising glance. “But my apologies for the thought.”

  “No offense taken.”

  “Will you walk two blocks more with me? There is something at my house I want to show you.”

  They left the square and walked up the main street. Soon they were in a quieter, darker district, and stopped in front of a tall white house.

  “We’ll step into the dining room,” Foltz said. “The family will be asleep upstairs.”

  He let them into the house, and they walked quietly through the parlor into the dining room. Two heavy pocket doors separated the rooms; Foltz pulled them closed before lighting a lamp.

  “No point in waking the household,” he said.

  On the dining room table, a railroad map of Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa was spread out, its corners held down by books. “I was intrigued the minute I read your handbill,” Foltz told Turner. “And your lecture this evening only confirmed my interest. For I perceive, sir, that you are an idealist.”

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘idealist,’“ Turner said. “I do not live in the world of ideals. Daybreak is very much real.”

  “Of course, of course. All the more intriguing. You have not merely speculated. You have felled trees, built homes, cleared ground. But you’ve done it in pursuit of your ideal.”

  “That’s true.”

  Foltz gestured to the map. “Could you show me, please, where this colony of yours is located? I have a notion, but am not sure.”

  Turner studied it. The map was out of date; it had the rail line snaking down from St. Louis only as far as De Soto. He traced with his finger the route from there to Pilot Knob. The road from Arcadia to Fredericktown was marked, and the one from St. Louis south through Fredericktown, Greenville, and into Arkansas. The course of the St. Francis River didn’t seem quite right, but no matter. He slid his finger to a spot an inch southwest of Fredericktown.

  “There,” he said. “As close as I can tell.”

  Foltz drew close and peered at the spot. “And from here to the Mississippi? What sort of terrain and people?”

  “A couple of fine river bottoms, very well peopled. In between, it’s rough, rough country, a few hill farmers but not much else.”

  “And how would you travel from there to the river?”

  Turner leaned back in his chair. He had guessed something like this was coming. “The easiest path is right up to St. Louis. Everyone knows that. Mr. Foltz, I need to tell you right now that I am not going to allow our settlement to be used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. We depend on the good will of our neighbors. If it became known that we were harboring runaways, we would not long continue in existence.”

  “I have no intention of asking you for such. As I told you, the fugitive slave law has cramped our activities considerably. I would not ask you to risk fines and imprisonment.”

  They sat and considered each other. Finally Foltz spoke again.

  “May I ask why are you undertaking this lecture tour? Surely your colony needs your leadership.”

  “I hold it as no shame to tell you that we are not yet self-supporting. We must have money to survive. Perhaps another year will make us independent of the outer world, but we are not today.”

  “So this tour is for cash.”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you say if I told you that this stop on your tour could yield you two hundred and fifty dollars over and above what you were anticipating? And that is in gold coin.”

  Turner waited.

  “This situation will not last forever,” Foltz said after a moment. “How it will end I do not know. Compromise, separation, war, who knows. What I do know is that when it all breaks loose, there will be thousands, perhaps millions of colored people trying to escape. We in the National Anti-Slavery Society will be ready to assist.”

  “And—?”

  “And I would like to send you a young man from Philadelphia to board at your settlement for a few months. He will be a traveling botanist, making sketches and collecting specimens in your part of the country. He will entice no runaways and transport no fugitives. He will simply be making observations, gathering information. He is single and comes from an impeccable background.”

  “Impeccable for a city of the East, perhaps. But I don’t need to remind you that these hill settlements have their own standards.”

  “Everything involves risk, Mr. Turner. You led a group of people out there with no idea of what would happen yourself. Surely others might accomplish something as well.”

  Foltz took a bottle from a side cabinet. “At any rate, let us drink to the continued success of your travels.” He poured two glasses, diluted it a little with water from a pitcher, and handed one to Turner. They saluted each other and drank. Foltz held his glass to the lamplight. “Tennessee whiskey,” he said. “Not your local corn.” Then a disgusted expression came over his face. “I see them everywhere. Working the fields of corn and barley, out in the woods cutting the oak for the barrels, the maple for the charcoal.” He drained his glass. “Even as I plot their freedom, I drink their blood. No wonder it burns going down.”

  An image came to Turner—th
e Hildebrand brothers in the darkness, their captive in tow, the tossing of a couple of coins into his hand—and a wave of shame and embarrassment came over him at having been complicit in the deed. He stood up abruptly and reached to shake Foltz’s hand.

  “I will be back through here in a few weeks,” he said. “I will have an answer for you then.”

  He walked back to his hotel through the darkening streets, the whiskey warm in his belly. Of course he could not bring the question to the community. Too many people were soft on the idea of slavery in the first place, and even those who opposed it wouldn’t want to antagonize the neighbors. Except for Cabot, of course, and probably Charlotte along with him. That man’s passion for abolition gleamed from his face. The two of them would probably see joining the Railroad as a fine thing, not a rash act that would attract the wrath of the entire county. No, if he brought this man to the colony, he would have to do it alone and keep his purpose behind a curtain.

  On the town square, the taverns were still brightly lit, but the cattle had all bedded down. He could see the two whores at the corner toward the river, hoping for some traffic from the steamboats, perhaps. He could tell they had spotted him—they edged in his direction. He considered for a moment. After his declaration to Foltz, it would be hypocritical of him even to think about calling over one of those ladies; but he definitely had an itch, and a man had needs.

  Turner pointed to the short, dark one, and waited for her in the shadow of a building’s corner.

  “Got a dollar to give a girl?” she said with professional brightness. “A dollar, eh?” he said. “What’s a dollar buy me?”

  “You have a room?” she said. Turner gestured to the hotel. “Nah, they won’t let me in there. Come down to Water Street with me.” She pulled at his shirt buttons.

  Just then the girl glanced over his shoulder and darted away. A night marshal strode toward them. “Don’t make me chase you!” he shouted. The girl stopped in her tracks. “Let’s have a look.”