Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  The bottomland forest, which had filled half the valley when he had arrived, was being pushed back toward them; the fringe of dead trees that had been girdled for this winter’s cutting was visible, and beyond it the belt of stumps yet to be pulled. Another few years and they would have the entire grove cut down, maybe forty more acres for crops. At the base of the mountain beyond, where the pasture gave way to forest, he could see some of the community’s hogs rooting; George had begun tolling them closer and closer to the barn with melon rinds and ears of corn, in anticipation of butchering day later this fall.

  “We’re going to have to manufacture something,” Turner said, mostly to himself.

  “What?”

  He pointed at the community. “How many people you think that river bottom can sustain? Just from the food grown on it.”

  Charlotte nodded. “I see what you mean. Even if we clear the whole valley, we can’t support more than twenty or thirty.”

  They looked down at the people.

  “What about the reaper?” Charlotte asked.

  “We harvest faster, but we don’t harvest more.”

  Again she nodded. “So we need another source of income. The Eagle?”

  “Good if it holds up. But not enough.”

  “Donations?”

  “Would you like to live on the goodwill of others?”

  They lapsed into silence again. “So what shall we do?” she asked. “If I only knew,” Turner said.

  They started the wagon down the rocky slope to the ford. Turner did not know what else to say.

  “Have you asked Adam? Maybe he will have an idea,” Charlotte said at one point. Her voice sounded strained.

  “After the harvest is over. I’m not eager to let anyone know my thoughts on this just yet.”

  “Very well.” She seemed to be deciding whether to say something. Finally she said, “This man Smith.…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid he’s going to cause more problems for us than he’s worth. He pesters Marie with suggestive remarks. He even made such remarks to me once.” Turner chuckled. “I guess you set him straight.”

  “Of course,” Charlotte replied. “But Marie is younger, and besides, no woman should have to put up with this nonsense in the first place.”

  She was right, naturally. Turner had observed Smith’s behavior but had written it off as the posturing of a silly young man determined to shock the world. Smith would have to be spoken to—not that it would do any good.

  The weeks went on, the harvest was complete, and first frost came early. Turner thought that a ropemaking venture might work. They could plant part of the bottom field in hemp and set up a ropewalk between the main road and the river, where the ground was flat. All it would take was patience and labor. He spoke about his idea with Cabot and Newton Carr privately first, and they walked up and down the road, measuring the distance they could set up a good straight ropewalk. Two hundred yards easily. Cabot had another idea: if they set it up close to the riverbank, they could dig out a little raceway and run the ropejack with water power. Carr, ever the engineer, pointed out that they didn’t need to make a raceway for a paddle wheel; the small amount of power they would need to turn a ropejack could be gained simply by setting a piling directly in the river and mounting a wheel on it, with the other end of its shaft mounted on the bank. He immediately began sketching what he would need.

  He sold the plan to the community at their next meeting.

  “Hemp’s a nigger crop,” Grindstaff said when Turner approached him about seed. “Grows like hell in the river bottoms, so I’m told. But yeah, if you want to make rope, I’ll sell it for you. And probably get you a good price, too.”

  Turner had begun planning his commentary on the Seneca Falls Declaration as soon as Charlotte had suggested it, and as cold weather took over he spent his afternoons in the print shed, composing. All summer they had kept the door to the shed wide open, trying to draw a breeze, but now it was closed, and they lit a fire in the stove to keep their hands warm and the ink soft.

  His plan was to have Marie set the original declaration down the left column. By the time she finished that, he would have his comments ready for her to set in the column alongside.

  He would use the simile of a flower to explain his point. Just as a flower does not spring up and bloom in a day, neither do conditions of equality in the world. First the root would have to be firmly set, the root of right relations in the economic sphere, from man to man. And as we could see by observing the world around us, not only was that root not set yet, it was still the barest of seeds, with communities like Daybreak the first tentative sprout. Once firm and healthy, the plant would produce its finest blossom—the right relations between man and woman.

  He liked it. He could imagine this column forming the basis for his next lecture tour—maybe next year? Who knows. Emerson toured every winter. He had half a mind to ride up to St. Louis and hear him again, pick up a few tricks, maybe even meet the old master himself.

  Turner was toying with the idea of making an allusion to the slavery question, perhaps the right relation between the races was, what, the seed? And the abolitionists were trying to rush the plant’s growth. Then he realized that the whole metaphor was the same one that had been used in the Herald’s snide little remark. It must have gotten lodged in his mind, and he had used it without thinking. That recognition irritated him, and he was about to scrap the whole column and start over, when he noticed that Marie had stopped typesetting.

  At first he thought she was merely proofing her work without a proof sheet, as any good typesetter could do, reading the column backward and from right to left. Her back was to him. But then he saw her wipe a tear from her eye with one knuckle and then wipe the knuckle on her printer’s apron. Her slender shoulders hunched forward. Turner walked to the layout table.

  “Marie,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  She glanced up, embarrassed, and wiped her eye again. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “It’s just—” she gestured at the Seneca Falls Declaration, now fully set and filling a whole column of type. “I’ve never read this before. It’s so—so—glorious.”

  “Really? Never read it?”

  “Never even heard of it,” she replied. “It was written, what, years ago?”

  “Ten,” Turner said. “Eleven now, I suppose.”

  “And signed by all these women—and men too. A hundred of them, it says here.”

  “Yes.”

  She ran her finger over the type. “I am a lucky woman,” she said. She gestured to the sheets of paper on the table beside her. “These great sentiments. My father and mother, all their lives they dream of a better world. My mother never sees more than a glimpse. But my father, he never lets this dream go away. For a time, he thought maybe someday we will live it out in France, but now it’s all empire, empire, the new Napoleon. We will never go back to France—” She stopped, and added quietly, “And we never want to, either. We are here today, working for this dream. We were meant to be in this place.” She smiled.

  Marie’s eyes were set in their usual squint, but the expression did not make her unattractive; it gave her a half-smile and an expectant look, as though she was perpetually anticipating some surprising treat. Her dark hair was braided and pulled back to keep it out of her work, and she had it tied in an ornate knot. Turner could see why all the young men wanted her.

  “You are a great man, you know,” she went on. “You have great ideas, strong ideas, and you do not just write them down. You make them happen. All around us, we see your ideas coming to life.”

  Turner smiled back at her. “Marie, I need to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “This man Smith. Is he bothering you? I hear tales that he is behaving in all too familiar a way.”

  She laughed. “Mr. Turner, surely you know I can manage a foolish man like Smith. I have managed all the Daybreak boys, and even Harp Webb has only been around one more time. Sm
ith is the least of my troubles.”

  “All right. But please know that if you ever need assistance—if—if this Smith becomes a problem—” He didn’t quite know what else to say. “Marie, you should marry,” he finally added. “You are young and attractive. You keep all the young men here in a constant state of excitement hoping to attract your favor. You could have any man in the colony.”

  She half-turned away, looking at the floor. “I will not marry,” she said. “I am like you, I have strong ideas. And one of those ideas is that I will not marry just to be convenient. I will only marry a man I love and admire.”

  Marie turned toward Turner and looked him in the eyes, her arms at her sides. “Surely you understand these convictions.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the man I would marry—” She paused but continued to look directly at him. “He cannot marry me.” The room was quiet. Turner understood and a rush of desire flooded through him. He knew it was insane, but took a step toward her. She did not step back.

  December 1858/February 1859

  Chapter 14

  George Webb squeezed Cabot’s arm as they walked to the evening meeting. “Hog-killing tomorrow. I know this isn’t your calling, so just watch me and follow along. Your job is to scrape hides and to stay out of the way of the boys who are gutting. Things can get very slippery. Good way to lose a finger.”

  Before dawn, they hung block-and-tackles from one of the big oak trees near the barn and placed the wash pots beneath them. “Not boiling, just scalding,” Webb warned the crew of ten- and twelve-year-olds whose job it was to tend the fires.

  Everyone stayed out of sight of the barn until the strongest young man of the colony, Schnack the carpenter, gave the sign that he had tolled the hogs into the pen with slops and latched the gate behind them. Then everyone came forward to inspect.

  “Twelve, not counting the babies,” Webb said, standing with one foot on the gate to peer over the hogs, which were milling restlessly, spooked by the throng of people. “We’ll let those two young ones go—there and there—so that makes ten. Good show. We won’t have to kill again till January, if that.”

  He nodded to Schnack, who was hefting a nine-pound hammer. “Take one at a time so you don’t get too far ahead of us. I’d get that old sow first, her and the big boar. They’ll be the most trouble. And mind the tushes. Don’t get in there with them until you’ve got those two killed.”

  Schnack swung himself up and sat on the gate as the hogs milled by, looking for a way out. The old sow and the boar were easy to spot; they were half a foot taller than the other hogs and weighed a good three hundred pounds each. He sat, hefting the hammer, while the boar passed by a few times; then when it passed again, swung the hammer over his head and brought it down hard directly on the hog’s skull. It dropped with a groan and lay twitching in the dirt. “Well done!” Turner cried.

  “Like pounding spikes,” Schnack said. The men moved in and dragged it out of the pen, then fastened the ropes around its hind feet and hoisted it up, sticking its throat just above the breastbone to drain the blood while its heart still beat. Then it was time to scald and scrape, working as fast as they could while the other hogs circled in the pen.

  The old sow was warier. She stayed at the far end of the stall, alternately watching Schnack and chasing the other pigs away from the best slops. Finally Webb grew impatient and had two of the men climb into the stall, using a half-finished wagon bed as a shield against the sow’s tusks. They pinned her in one corner of the stall, where Schnack stunned her with two swings.

  “That was the king and queen of that herd,” Cabot said as they hoisted and stuck the sow.

  “They’ll have new royalty by spring,” said Webb.

  Cabot couldn’t help feeling that Turner’s eyes were on him all the time, although he knew it was probably his imagination. Scraping the hide was simple work but hard; he followed Webb’s instructions and stayed clear of the men who were gutting and splitting. Charlotte, moving among the men, was always at the periphery of his awareness. He could hear her quiet voice and her ready laugh. He kept his head down and scraped. “Not too hard,” said Webb over his shoulder. “You don’t want to slip and cut through the skin, not that these brutes have a soft hide.”

  The rest of the killing went easily after the two old ones had been finished off. With the pigs unable to see behind themselves, Schnack could easily work his way around the pen. By morning’s end his hammer was covered in blood, and he was drenched in sweat and dirt. Schnack wanted to catch the blood for blutwurst, so the women held pans beneath the hogs’ pierced necks before they were hoisted into the tree, one by one.

  “Now what?” Charlotte called to Schnack. She held a steaming bowl of blood at arm’s length. Her breath frosted in the air.

  “Put it in a crock somewhere to let it cool,” Schnack said. “Somewhere safe. Don’t let no dogs get after it. I’ll mix it up tomorrow.”

  “All right,” she said. Cabot tried to be nonchalant as he watched her walk toward the print shed. Made sense. It had a secure door latch and was unheated for the day. He lowered his head, thinking, and felt in his pocket. On one of his walks he had snipped some sprigs of bittersweet, and wanted to give them to her. The bright orange berries were so cheerful against the gray of the winter forest.

  Charlotte placed the bowl of blood against the wall of the print shed, steam rising from it in the chilly air. She saw the proof page of Turner’s column lying in a shaft of light on the composition table, and although she knew she should get back to the work outside, she couldn’t resist.

  It was good. She could hear Turner in it, musing, talking to himself, working himself around to a position. It wasn’t where she wanted him to be, of course, but he was making a turn. That was always his way—he never admitted to being wrong, just reasoned and reasoned until he found himself in a new position, which somehow wasn’t supposed to be a contradiction of the old.

  She smiled at his phrasing and recognized that he was trying out a new lecture. What did this mean? He was already thinking ahead to next year, knowing that the colony would need more cash. Or was this just a fallback plan in case the ropemaking didn’t work out? Or was it simply that he was tired of living in Daybreak and needed the excitement of a lecture tour to keep himself interested? If that was true, she would insist on going along.

  The latch on the door clicked open. Charlotte turned. There stood Adam Cabot, wearing the expression of lip-quivering resolution that a man gets when he is about to launch into something regrettable.

  He closed the door and walked toward her, his gaze intense. He stopped about a foot away. They stood in silence. Then he pulled some bittersweet vines, twisted into a tight wreath, from his coat pocket and handed them to her.

  “These are for you,” he said. “I thought of you when I saw them—so beautiful, so much life in the cold.”

  Charlotte’s face felt hot. Then Cabot stepped forward again, took her by the shoulders, and kissed her.

  She reached up and kissed him back, willingly, hard, and for an endless moment she felt the same sensations as she had the previous time, by the river. She was bodiless, expanding, growing lighter and lighter, like a cloud on a summer day. She stumbled backward a little, and mindful of the bowl behind her, drew away to catch her balance. Cabot caught her and pulled her toward him. “I must know,” he said. “Is this attachment real?”

  “Of course it is real,” Charlotte said. “What do you take me for?” Her weightless feeling vanished; she walked to the other side of the composing table. She tried to choose her words. “It is just as real as this table. No less so. But the words on this page are also real, and this colony, and the people in it. One reality does not obliterate the others.”

  His face contorted with unhappiness. “So this hardscrabble life in the woods—this is to be your fate?”

  “Apparently it is. At least for now.”

  “You were meant for higher things, Charlotte. What happened to
making the world a better place?”

  “You imply that we are not.”

  Cabot frowned. “That’s not what I meant. But with so much going on in the country, it is hard to just cultivate your garden. This man Lincoln—”

  “Didn’t impress James much.”

  “But at least Lincoln is in the arena, and I am not.”

  Charlotte turned toward the door. “There is work to do. We can discuss our various futures another time.” She paused at the threshold, noticing her appearance for the first time, bespattered with blood and hair, bits of skin and fat. These clothes would take a great deal of washing before they became clean again. “Please wait a few minutes before leaving. It will not do for us to be seen leaving this building together.”

  “I love you, Charlotte.”

  Her hand was on the latch. She closed her eyes and held her breath. She imagined him behind her, his hands on her shoulders, turning her toward him, pulling her to him, insistent … was that what she wanted? Did she want him to stop her from leaving, to turn her around, to kiss her again, to insist she face the truth about her feelings? What would happen then? She waited, expectant, hungering to feel the heat from his body against hers. But he stayed where he was, and she opened the latch. “I know you do.”

  She left the shed and strode toward the barn, disappointed in herself. Disappointed in life. Of course she loved him. Why couldn’t she say it back, and at least give the man a little comfort? She told herself that it was to avoid giving him false hope, but inwardly she knew she was afraid to speak the words, afraid of the feelings they might unleash, the chain of events that could occur, the great unraveling of lives and fortunes. As if a chain of events wasn’t already in motion. As if she had the power to redirect it by her simple acts of word and will.