Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  The night marshal passed Turner and took the girl by the elbow. “This woman bothering you?” he said.

  “Not at all, just making conversation,” said Turner.

  “I’ll bet you were.” The marshal turned the whore’s face to the light from a tavern. “I don’t recognize you,” he said to her. “New in town?”

  “Yes, sir,” she muttered.

  “Just in from your pappy’s farm, too, I’ll wager.” The girl didn’t speak, and he cuffed her lightly on the top of her head with his open hand. “Or chased out of New Orleans for spreading the pox, more likely. Here’s the rule, you toothless little bitch. Stay below Third Street.” He shoved her in the direction of the river.

  “Now, just a minute,” Turner spoke out. The marshal sized him up.

  “Defending the lady’s honor, now?” he said, approaching Turner with a hint of menace. “That’s precious. Trust me, sir, these whores know the rules. I take it you’re a traveler, so I’ll explain.” He gestured to the square. “Up here, we keep it clean. Down by the river, look for a red blanket over the transom, if you fancy that kind of thing.” He touched Turner’s chest with his nightstick. “But I’d take my smelling salts, if I were you.”

  As the marshal stepped away, Turner exhaled with relief. What had he been thinking? This would just be his moment to get robbed, or exposed, or written up by some humorous newspaperman. He would have to wait to get his itch scratched. He walked into the lobby of his hotel and climbed upstairs, giving no glance to the sleepy desk clerk.

  With Turner gone, Charlotte met with Adam Cabot and George Webb for a few minutes every evening to talk about the colony’s progress. They would carry a couple of the benches from the Temple of Community out under a maple tree and sit, go over the day, and plan for tomorrow, with Newton playing nearby. It was full summer. The men worked after dinner till dark scything hay and hoeing corn.

  Now that the Temple was finished, the community had begun eating their dinner together, taking shifts to keep enough dishes on the table. It was chaotic at first until the women figured out how much food to make and how to serve it so that the last group’s meal wasn’t cold and sparse. But the shared meal, the laughter and teasing of the men over incidents of the day, the time for announcements and plans, made Daybreak feel more real to her, more like an established community than a mere cluster of cabins.

  Webb had the precision of a lifelong farmer, and when he announced it was time to cut hay or pick beans, they obeyed his instincts. He could no longer keep up with the scythers so he drove the team instead, instructing the young men about how to stack the hay on the wagon. The new barn was all but finished; Charlotte’s father had placed it on the slope of the hill behind the community, so that the wagons could drive in on one level and dump hay into the main loft and grain into the bins, and the cattle could be fed on the lower level. A simple thing, really, Carr told everyone, a design you could see all over New England. The walls of the bottom level were built of the local stone, just like the Temple. The cattle already liked to congregate in the cool interior in the afternoons, even though with plenty of grass in the pasture they were not yet being fed.

  The crops looked good this year. This was their second cutting of hay; the first had been harvested in late June and already made an impressive stack in the loft. The men were turning the rows of cut hay with their forks, and if no rain came in another couple of days, would add it to the great stack in the barn.

  The days were hot and the nights warm and humid; it was hard to tell which was more uncomfortable. If they left the oilcloth down over their window openings, the air inside was stifling, but if they raised it, the mosquitoes plagued them. So they lingered outside as long as possible, until darkness or fatigue pushed them in. One night a great storm of meteors lit the sky overhead as they sat on their benches; everyone stood in the street to watch the spectacle in the muggy night.

  “Your old-timers would say this is a sign,” George Webb said. “And what do you say, George?” Cabot asked.

  “I say we make our own signs,” Webb said, his head tilted toward the sky to watch. “We read the page of Nature as best we can, but we are always reading it in our own language, try as we might to read it in hers.”

  “You’re a man of enlightened views,” Cabot said.

  “Don’t sound so surprised!” Webb said, laughing. “Even us simple hill folk are entitled to an idea once in a while.” He quieted Cabot’s protestations with a wave of his hand. “It’s all right. I’m just having some fun at your expense.”

  “Seriously, George, how did you come to be so open to new ideas?” Charlotte said quietly. “It’s not common, you know—for country people or city.”

  “Same as the two of you, I would reckon,” Webb said. “Reading, reading, reading. Ever since I was a boy, books were my constant companion. When I come out here to try my luck, I brought half a wagonload of books with me, and every trip to St. Louis I brought back more. This place might be isolation, but I could bring the world to me.”

  “And yet—” Charlotte stopped, realizing that what she was about to say might seem impertinent. But Webb read her thoughts.

  “Yes,” he said. “And yet my only son bucks everything I do. He won’t pick up a book. I build up a two thousand acre farm, he won’t cultivate more than twenty. Just enough to keep his whiskey business going.” The anger in his voice was impossible to miss. Charlotte and Cabot sat quiet. Charlotte had the feeling that she had triggered a spring that might better have been left untouched.

  “And yes,” Webb went on, “maybe my offer to place Daybreak on this land was not a pure decision. Maybe it came from frustration, or pique, or what have you, at the sight of this fine river bottom land going back to forest. When I was a young man, by God, I would not have sat on my tail end all day and watched whiskey drip out of a spigot.” He stopped abruptly. “But I embarrass myself. You don’t need to hear an old man’s railings.”

  “I don’t hear any railings,” Cabot said. His voice was soft. “I hear the hard-earned wisdom of a fine and generous man.”

  “Oh, go on,” Webb said. But Charlotte could tell from his tone of voice that the old man was pleased.

  It was at one of these after-dinner meetings that Charlotte realized her feelings toward Adam Cabot had changed, deepened, and that she could easily become attracted to him if she allowed herself to. The idea came to her while he was talking. Something about the way he spoke started it, maybe his habit, like Turner’s, of looking directly at the person he was talking to, as if there was no other person anywhere. That intensity, the look, brought back memories of their long talks during their trip together to Missouri. She remembered other things as well: the curve of his wrist as he held the reins, the three-notes-descending tone of his laugh, the way they became comfortable with each other immediately, and remained comfortable even without speaking. His earnest idealism had encouraged her during the long journey. There was something of that wonder in him yet; he spoke often of wildflowers he had seen or unfamiliar birds. Set against the hardcore practicality of survival, it was his unguarded gentleness that she thought of first.

  Turner was the only man she had ever been with, of course, and her only real suitor. Those ardent cadets of past years had not been interested in her for herself, but in the idea of her, what she represented. She knew full well why she loved and had married Turner—his determination, his gift for talk, the intensity that gave him the ability to imagine and then create Daybreak. It was all still there, and she still loved it all, and of course there was Newton. But yet she wondered if she had made the right choice. Perhaps she should have waited, encouraged other men. It was a silly thought. What other men?

  And why on earth think about such a thing now? She had never been a flirt. Still, she had to admit she had always been drawn to Cabot’s easy conversation, his manners, his quick mind. Nothing would be wrong with enjoying a little tender feeling. She liked being near him. It felt warm and good.

&nb
sp; She began to imagine Cabot as her suitor, her lover, her husband, pleasing fancies that filled her with a tingling warmth. He was clean-shaven, unlike most of the men, and his habit of taking a morning trip to the river gave him a curiously fresh smell. Even in the evening, when all the men were drenched in sweat from the day’s work, he was different. She noticed it when they spoke and remembered it later in the evenings.

  In the night she returned her thoughts to Turner and loved him all over again. The intensity with which he embraced her was unforgettable. She pushed stray thoughts from her mind and focused on him, remembered the length of his body pressed against hers, the feel of his shoulders as he moved into her. She imagined him there with her, closed her eyes and pressed herself beneath her gown.

  But in the dawn Cabot walked past her house from his visit to the river, his hair slicked back and wet, and she thought of him as he must have looked a few minutes before, lowering his body into the cool water. He was a head shorter than Turner, his body compact. She was sure he must be a fine dancer. She imagined them dancing, his hand light on her waist as he guided her through a courtesy turn. She would have to organize a dance for the harvest.

  Newton was asleep in his crib. She stepped out into the humid morning air. Cabot had already passed the house and was gone. She was still in her gown. Turner had had a great flat stone brought up from the river last year and placed in front of the door as a step, a stone that took four men to get off the wagon. It was cool under her bare feet.

  Charlotte stepped off the stone onto the packed dirt of the yard. But she couldn’t think where to walk. So she just sat down on the doorstone. A wren warbled from a dogwood tree across the road. It was going to be another miserably hot day, she could already tell. Soon the others would be waking. But for now she would sit in the stillness and listen to the sounds of the morning, listen and think about her life.

  How had she gotten to this place? What was she doing here? Had she made a decision or just been swept along by events, one thing and then another?

  She couldn’t say. But here she was, with a child sleeping behind her and the road and the river in front of her, and a little town full of people off to her left.

  She thought about the three lives she had in her care at this time, her husband, her father, and her son. All three were here, so of course she would never go anywhere until—until whenever something else happened, she supposed. And then what? She was a stick on the river, carried along by currents she could not control and could barely even feel. She knew this was her role in life, but that knowledge brought her no comfort. It would be good just once to take charge of herself, to make her own decisions.

  The predawn light was quickly brightening. She went inside to start Newton’s breakfast.

  Chapter 12

  The lectures at Galesburg and Peoria went well. Decent crowds, good halls. But in Princeton, the Converse Hall was practically empty, except for a group of Swedes who came up from Bishop Hill. Large, rough, mournful men, they sat silently through his lecture and then filed out at the end as if on command.

  “What’s going on here?” Turner asked the janitor, the only man remaining in the room.

  “They’ve never been the same since their leader got killed,” the man said. “They thought he was going to rise from the dead. Guess what, he didn’t.”

  “No, I mean everybody else,” said Turner. “Where is everybody?”

  “Gone over to Ottawa for the candidates’ debate tomorrow,” the janitor said. “Bad time for you, sorry about that. But nobody don’t want to talk about nothing else all week than the candidates’ debate.”

  So Turner found himself riding a hack to Bureau Junction the next morning to catch the train for Ottawa, a slow choker that never got up enough speed to outrun its own cloud. They crept along the river until they got to La Salle, where the train stopped for no apparent reason for a half hour. By then the August day had turned scorching, the train was packed with passengers quarreling over the election, and Turner thought for a moment he would just get out and walk. Since Springfield, he had been keeping the proceeds from the lectures in a pouch strapped to his chest to ward off pickpockets. In the crush of the crowd, it galled him miserably.

  But after La Salle they made better time, stampeding from the train as soon as it slowed. Everyone else seemed to know where they were going, so Turner fell in with the stream and soon found himself in the city square along with five or six thousand other people.

  The candidates were seated on a wooden platform at one end of the park, mopping their faces as other speakers heated up the crowd. Judge Douglas sat upright on a straight-backed chair with the air of an experienced politician, acknowledging the heat only by wiping his face occasionally with a large handkerchief. The challenger, Lincoln, sat more like the farmers who used to hang around the newspaper office. He shifted from ham to ham and jiggled one leg, and dust seemed to gather on his charcoal suit even as he sat there.

  Douglas spoke first and went straight to the attack. Turner had generally voted Democratic in the past, and he had to admire the senator’s debating skill. He gave Lincoln enough rhetorical questions to answer that he would have to spend the rest of the afternoon on the defensive. And sure enough, Lincoln took the bait, replying and replying and replying, unable to get to his points until nearly an hour had gone by.

  The crowd looked to be Republicans mainly. They cheered Lincoln at every turn, finally carrying him away on their shoulders awkwardly after the whole thing was over. Two of the men holding him up were short, so Lincoln’s legs dangled halfway to the ground. But as Turner stood in the trampled square, watching the throng disperse, he didn’t feel like cheering for either candidate. The whole debate had seemed to devolve into you’re-a-liar-no-I’m-not, and he-loves-niggers-no-I-don’t. The train was headed back to Princeton. He needed to get back to the hotel and pick up his things, but he stopped at the post office long enough to send a note to Hiram Foltz back in Quincy.

  From there he went north to Dixon and Galena, then crossed into Wisconsin for stops in Janesville and Milwaukee. “You should go to Chicago, friend,” said a man in Milwaukee. “That’s where things are going on.”

  “I thought that place was a swamp,” Turner said.

  “Swamp it was,” said the man. “They decided to raise the city. Brought in more dirt than you ever seen, dirt by the wagonload. They’re putting jackscrews under the buildings, crank ‘em up, fill in underneath. Never seen nothing like it.”

  Turner’s return train went through Chicago, but he had not reserved a hall. Besides, it was getting close to harvest time. So he didn’t try to stay, but stood on the platform and gazed east, looking at the glints of the lake that he could see between the roofs of houses and hotels. The city was just as the man said, booming and noisy, excited conversations in strange languages passing between people who rushed past him on their way to somewhere important. Sure enough, some houses and buildings, even whole blocks, had been raised up seven or eight feet. Others were up on jacks, and the streets were a crazy patch of heaved dirt and brick, ramps and sudden drop-offs, planks pitched out into the streets across gaping holes where the dirt had settled unevenly.

  Between trains a man sidled up. “Where you headed, friend?”

  “Quincy.”

  “We’re bigger’n Quincy now. Quincy’s the past, we’re the future.” He gestured out at the city, where Turner could see a two-story brick house creeping down the street, rolled on logs by a straining team.

  “So it appears.”

  “Spending the night?”

  Turner looked at the man more closely. He was small but muscular, balanced on the balls of his feet like a boxer, but with the practiced smile of a pimp.

  “No, just catching the next train.”

  “I got a girl in a wagon down here, entertain you till your train comes.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Nice wagon, wooden sides, nobody peeks in. Pretty little gal too.”

  �
��Thanks, but—” Something about the man didn’t seem right to Turner, and suddenly he stopped what he was about to say and backed away, turning abruptly and running toward the station end of the platform without another word.

  “Hey!” shouted the man, but Turner didn’t turn around until he reached the station door. Then, feeling momentarily foolish, he looked back to see the man running about ten yards behind him. Another man had come out of nowhere and was running alongside, a heavy cudgel in his hand. When they saw that Turner had reached the door, they leaped off the platform and disappeared down the tracks.

  Turner stayed inside the station house until the Quincy train was called.

  That night the train pulled off without notice on some siding somewhere, and everyone had to sleep in their seats. They reached Quincy about noon the next day; Turner walked to Hiram Foltz’s cigar factory on the riverfront, dodging another herd of cattle destined for the slaughterhouse next door. The factory floor was filled with men, some black, some white, sitting at wide tables covered with stacks of tobacco leaves, more tobacco leaves in their laps. One of the men glanced up as Turner entered.

  “Upstairs,” he said, indicating the stairway with a nod of his head.

  Foltz’s office was on the third floor, where the noise and smells were less. He came out from behind his desk and shook Turner’s hand. “So you’ve decided to help us out.”

  “I have my doubts,” Turner said. “But I have to admire the firmness of your convictions.”

  “Those opposed to us are equally firm in their convictions,” Foltz said. “Regardless, I am glad to have you on our side.”

  “I didn’t say I was on your side. I just said I’d take in your man.”

  “Good enough.”

  They set off for his home, walking as quickly as Foltz’s limp would allow. His wife, a lean, serious-looking woman with her hair pulled back tightly from a center part, met them at the door.

  “Your fellow is out back,” she said.