Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “Gentlemen,” he said quietly. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “What seems to be the problem,” the man said, “is that your friend here is a nigger-stealer and a sodomite. Set him up, how about, pal.”

  The fire popped and crackled high into the black sky, and Turner’s face felt hot. The big man propped Smith against a small maple tree.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Turner croaked.

  The one-armed man glanced off into the dark at the edge of the fire. Turner followed his glance. Another man lay on the ground, bound and bloody. A black man.

  “Wouldn’t have caught him if it hadn’t been for some of our local niggers,” the man said. “Came to their owner, said there was a runaway hiding out in the woods, came to them for food, wanted to get away from a crazy white man who was wanting to hold his dick. Ain’t that right, Cuffy?” He walked over and poked the runaway with his boot. The man groaned and stirred a little. He kicked him harder. “I said ain’t that right?”

  “Yes’r,” the man said.

  The small man walked back to Turner. “So are you a nigger-stealer too?” The eye-holes of the flour sack were dark and empty. Turner looked into them anyway. “I am not,” he said.

  “The shit you aren’t,” said the man.

  Turner could see no point in repeating his denial. He stood and faced the man silently.

  The third man, still holding his shotgun, edged out of the firelight. “I can’t breathe under this thing,” he said. “I’m going to step over here and take it off for a minute. Catch my breath.”

  “Fuck you are,” the one-armed man said, turning toward him. “Anything happens here, happens with all of us. Ain’t nobody going to say, ‘Oh I didn’t see nothing. I wasn’t there. I was off feeding the horses.’ You stay right here.” He turned back and spoke to Turner. “So tell me about this man Smith.”

  Turner tried to hold his voice steady. “He’s been a paying guest at our settlement since September. He’s a botanist.”

  “What the fuck’s a botanist?”

  “A man of science, he studies plants. He’s looking at plants.”

  The big man spoke up. “That’s what he said. That’s what he said too.”

  “Oh, shut your ass and let me think,” said the little man. “Of course they’d have a story cooked up.”

  All this time, Sam Hildebrand had been squatting at the edge of the group, twirling a leaf between his thumb and forefinger. The one-armed man turned to him.

  “What do you think, Sam? Think this man’s telling the truth?”

  Hildebrand continued to twirl the leaf. “This ain’t my concern,” he said. “You asked me to fetch this feller, and I did it. Everything else is your ball of yarn.”

  This just seemed to make the one-armed man angrier. He stomped back to Smith. “Plant man, eh?” He shook the young tree that Smith was propped up against. “What kind of tree is this, Mister Plant Man?”

  Smith arched his head back stiffly a couple of inches. “I … I can’t—” He faltered. “I can’t see. I can’t tell.” The effort of speaking opened up a crack in his lip, which began to bleed again.

  “He’s got little drawings in his book,” the big man said.

  “Yeah, and he had a nigger down on the creek bank too.” The small man went over to one of the horses and brought back a looped rope. “It’s a maple tree, you piece of shit. How do you fancy the idea of getting hung from a maple tree? Will that suit you?” He put the loop over Smith’s head and tightened it, then tossed the other end of the rope over the nearest branch.

  Turner started for the small man. The big one got between them, grabbing Turner by the shoulders and flinging him backward like a child. Turner hit the ground, gathered himself, paused in a crouch, tried to think of his next move. He had a knife in his pocket. But..

  His thoughts were interrupted by the click of a revolver’s hammer locking into place. All eyes went to Sam Hildebrand, who had stood up and was facing them, his revolver pointed at the ground.

  “Calm down, boys,” Hildebrand said. “You want to scrap, go someplace where you can charge admission for it.”

  The silence that followed was finally broken by the small man. “Sam’s right, boys. We’re here on business.” He squared off toward Turner again. “Paying guest, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who paid you?”

  “He did.”

  “Oh yeah?” The man thought for a moment. “Where’s he from?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “And you know anything about this nigger-stealing?”

  Turner did not move his gaze from the hollow eye-holes. “No. I do not.”

  They faced each other in silence. Finally the one-armed man turned to Hildebrand. “What do you think, Sam? Think this bastard’s telling the truth?”

  “I told you I ain’t in this business. I fetched him, you got him.”

  “Well, ain’t that convenient, Mister, Mister—” The man’s voice sputtered and came to a halt as his attention once again settled on Hildebrand’s revolver. “So you can’t vouch for him?”

  “I don’t vouch for him nor accuse him either,” Hildebrand said.

  “You think he’s a truthful man?”

  “I got no reason to think he ain’t.”

  The man faced Turner again. “Will you swear? Swear on the Bible that you and your people ain’t got nothing to do with this man?”

  “Like I said, he’s our guest, and he’s made himself welcome.” Turner swallowed, trying to keep his throat moist. “He’s never said a word about stealing slaves. And yes, I will swear.”

  Hildebrand interrupted again. “An oath made under threat ain’t valid. Everybody knows that. You just got to take this man at his word or not.”

  The little man seemed to take this as a vote of confidence. “Well, since Sam here vouches for you—” He paused. “—says you’re an honest man, that’s good enough for me. Good enough for you boys?” The other two men muttered unintelligibly. “Just so you know, we ain’t letting no Underground Railroad start up around here. You bear that in mind.”

  Lysander Smith’s voice croaked up. “I didn’t mean—”

  The small man walked over to him. “Well, the Philadelphia lawyer wants to make a speech. Speak up, Nancy.”

  Smith looked up at him and tried to smile. “I didn’t mean anyone—I didn’t mean any harm.”

  The man punched him square in the face. “Fuck you, Nancy. This may be how you do things back in Philadelphia, but they ain’t how we do things out here. We’ll take this nigger back south, because he’s worth money plus a reward. But you—” He picked up the end of the rope from the ground. “You are a worthless Nancy-ass piece of unnatural Eastern shit.” He walked to one of the horses and whipped the rope around its saddle horn several times. “And we’re going to hoist you up.”

  The man took the horse’s reins and led it forward a few feet. The rope lost its slack almost immediately, pulling Smith to his feet. The loop around his neck tightened. His cheeks bulged, and he flailed from side to side, trying to find air.

  “Please!” Turner cried. “This man’s worth something. He comes from a wealthy family. I’m sure they’d pay—”

  “God’s shit!” said the one-armed man. “What do you think we are, kidnappers?”

  Turner turned to the two other flour sacks. “Please! You can’t kill this man.” The men shuffled their feet.

  The one-armed man spoke up loudly. “We are deputized to do whatever it takes to find and return runaways. And I say this is what it takes.”

  He gave the horse’s reins another jerk, pulling it forward a couple of feet. The little maple tree swayed downward under the extra weight of Lysander Smith being lifted off the ground. His feet dangled in the air, kicking wildly.

  “If he tries to help his friend, shoot him,” the one-armed man said to the man with the shotgun.

  “You heard him, mister,” the man said to Turner in a weak voice.
He waved the shotgun in Turner’s direction.

  Turner thought about testing the man’s resolve, but the big man stepped toward him too and picked up an axe handle from the ground. The end was matted with blood and hair. “If he don’t stop you, I will,” he said.

  Smith thrashed wildly, and a trickle of blood ran from his nose. The young maple tree from which he was dangling bent further; it was too small to support a man’s weight. Smith’s feet touched the ground. Straining against the rope that bound his hands, he balanced on his toes.

  “Shit,” the one-armed man said. “Hold his feet up, pal.”

  The big man looked nervously at the struggling man. “I ain’t holding nobody’s feet.”

  The tree drooped lower. “Goddamit, one of you bastards hold up his feet!” He pulled the horse another few feet, and Smith lifted off the ground again. The tree swayed under the struggle, and for a moment Turner thought the limb might break. Smith’s face was purple in the firelight. His toes scraped the ground. He tried to bounce up and down to give himself some slack in the rope.

  “You should have tied his feet,” said the man with the shotgun.

  “Just take the fucker’s fucking feet and hold them off the ground!” said the one-armed man. “This won’t take more than another couple of minutes.”

  “That’s bad luck,” said the big man.

  “Bad luck! I’ll make you think bad luck, you waste of shit.”

  “Oh you will, will you? I’d like to see that!” Smith was still thrashing and it seemed to Turner that he might be getting one of his hands loose.

  Sam Hildebrand stood up abruptly. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” he said. He walked up to Smith, put his pistol to the base of his skull, and pulled the trigger.

  The roar of the pistol shot seemed to have made them all deaf and mute. All Turner could hear was its echoes in his ears. Everyone stood silent. Smith’s body twitched and trembled a few times and then hung still.

  Hildebrand put his revolver in his belt and walked to his horse. “You can let him down now, you ninny,” he said. The little man backed up the horse, letting Smith’s body sink to the ground.

  Hildebrand mounted up. “You boys better get the hell out of here. That shot might wake somebody. Don’t forget your nigger.” He looked at Turner. “He’s all yours now.”

  He rode off into the dark, leaving the men in their flour-sack masks silent. Then in a frenzy of activity, they gathered themselves and disappeared, tossing the runaway slave over the neck of one of their horses. Turner could hear them cursing and arguing as they rode away.

  Turner untied Smith’s hands and carried his limp body away from the fire. At the base of a tree, he found Smith’s coat and pocketbooks. His horse shied away when he tried to lift the man’s body over its neck, but after a couple of attempts he managed to heave it up. He led the horse to the road and climbed into the saddle.

  The road was unrecognizable to him in the dark, and even if it had been daylight he wouldn’t have known it anyway. It seemed to run east and west, but he had no idea where from or to. He went back the way he came, and when he saw the knocked-down brush where he and Hildebrand had come through, turned the horse into the woods again.

  He gave his horse a loose rein, and it worked its way up the slope until soon they were back on the ridgetop. Turner let the horse find its way, urging it forward whenever it wanted to stop, and after a while he began to think it knew its way home.

  Turner’s mind was numb. He sensed danger lurking behind him, as if the murderers might change their minds and pursue him as well, but he didn’t hasten home. Logic told him that they had been just as shocked and scattered by the sudden end to Smith’s life as he had, but logic was not what made him plod through the dimness. It was the overwhelming sense of failure, the recognition that he had led the colony into a dangerous place with no clear way out. He felt a deep foreboding that the limp body bouncing across the horse’s neck was simply the first of many, and that he should have known their adventure would come to this. What had he been thinking, taking dozens of bookworms into the woods? They would be lucky if the place didn’t kill them all.

  Daylight seeped into the air imperceptibly until at one moment Turner noticed that he could make out the bark on the trees. And sure enough, by full dawn his horse had led him to the river crossing.

  Turner stopped to let the horse drink and took Smith’s body down. He dipped his handkerchief in the river to bathe his face. The body was still warm, though cooling fast, and the caked blood came off with a little wiping. The handkerchief wasn’t much good on his hair, though, and Turner ended up dipping the back of Smith’s head into the river to wash out the blood. It trailed downstream, a pink tendril that disappeared into the common flow within a few yards. Blood lost in the water, a life lost in the night. Everything vanishing downstream. He smoothed out the hair as best he could, but it still looked like a stringy knot.

  An hour later he was at Daybreak. He had tied Smith’s coat around his head to try to make less of a spectacle, but with the man’s arms and legs dangling halfway to the ground on each side, it was still a gruesome load to bring home.

  As he passed the Webbs’ house, Harp came out onto his porch. “Told him not to drink that shit from downriver,” he said. Turner looked up at him silently and kept riding.

  A dozen or more people had gathered around Turner’s door, alerted no doubt by Charlotte, and watched as he arrived. George Webb and a couple of others helped him take Smith from the horse and carry him inside.

  “Did he drown?” someone said. “His head’s all wet.”

  But when they laid him on the table, face up, and everyone could see the burnt-looking bruise across Smith’s neck and the wound in the back of his head, no one asked any questions for a moment. Charlotte picked up Newton and took him into the back. Adam Cabot drew in a sharp breath and left the room.

  Smith’s hair had fallen across his face. Webb lifted it with his thumb and examined the marks of the beating. “How many were there?” he said.

  Turner didn’t feel like talking quite yet. “Three,” he said.

  “Hildebrand?”

  “Sam wasn’t one of the three. Three plus Sam is what I meant.”

  More people arrived as the news spread. Turner knew he should go out and say something to them, but was too tired. He didn’t know what he would say anyway. Go home before it’s too late, perhaps. He went into the back room and lay on the bed, where Charlotte was curled up with Newton playing count-the-toes. He kicked off his boots and rolled over on his side, embracing her. Newton squirmed between them with delight.

  “You’re home,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  She said nothing, simply placed her arm over his head and drew him to her. There was a quiet knock at the bedroom door. “Adam Cabot’s saddled up a horse,” a voice said.

  Turner rolled onto his back and didn’t move any further. Let him go if he wanted to play hero. He wouldn’t even know which way to ride. Who knows, maybe Cabot knew Smith’s little secrets himself. At this moment he didn’t care.

  “I’ll go see,” Charlotte said.

  He heard her voice outside the window, hailing Cabot as he rode down from the barn. “Adam, where are you going?” she called. “Fredericktown,” Cabot said. “What on earth for?”

  There was a pause and a rustling. “To fetch the sheriff. Charlotte, we are not outside the boundaries of civilization here.”

  “Of course. Godspeed.” The sound of a horse riding off.

  Turner closed his eyes. The sheriff. Good luck. All he wanted to do was let the night’s events vanish for a while. He kept his eyes closed as he heard Charlotte come into the room and take Newton away, leaving through the back door and shutting it behind herself quietly. The image of Smith’s dangling body and kicking feet lingered in his mind. Then blackness swept over him, and he was asleep.

  May/August 1859

  Chapter 16

  Cabot reache
d Fredericktown shortly after noon and found Sheriff Willingham at his home taking a nap. He waited on the porch until Willingham came to the door, scratching himself. “There’s been a murder out at Daybreak,” he said.

  Willingham walked to his stable and saddled a horse without a word. “Do you want to hear what happened?” Cabot said.

  “Not yet,” Willingham said over his shoulder. “There’s water for your horse yonder, and the missus will give you coffee if you want it.”

  Cabot let his horse water, but skipped the coffee as Willingham led his mount outside to a stump from which he climbed into the saddle.

  “You’re not taking a weapon?” Cabot asked as he rode up beside him. “Is somebody out there going to try to shoot me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “All right then. If I have to chase a man, I can always borry a gun, or come back here to load up gear. No point in weighing myself down.”

  They arrived in the colony late that afternoon, with Cabot riding ahead pushing the pace, and went straight to the Turners’ house. Willingham spit out his chaw before he came through the door. Turner was sitting in a chair in the corner, and a group of women had gathered, awaiting permission to wash Smith’s body. “Ladies, y’all need to clear out while I talk to this man,” Willingham said to the women. He pulled some chairs away from the table into the center of the room and leaned over the body of Lysander Smith.

  “They done quite a job on him,” he said.

  “The big one had an axe handle,” Turner said, his voice flat. “That’ll do the trick,” Willingham said.

  Turner repeated the story of the night before. No one interrupted. When he reached the part about the black man and the killers’ accusation of sexual misadventure, Cabot could feel the air in the room grow tense. He walked to the table and looked over Willingham’s shoulder into the face of the dead man, its bruises changing from red to a purplish gray. So many secrets had been concealed behind that face. Could one man ever truly know another? Or were the feelings of another always dark? He considered himself and the secrets he concealed, and supposed it was just as well that the path into the labyrinth of a man’s heart was so hard to find.