Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “Well?” Turner whispered.

  “They all made it through,” she whispered back. “We’ll see in the morning. Frances seems in good shape, considering what she’s endured. Both the babies are alive. One is stronger than the other.”

  “Boys or girls?”

  “Both girls. Sarah and Penelope.”

  Turner chuckled quietly. “Penelope. Now there’s a name.”

  “She seemed quite certain.”

  “Penelope it is, then.”

  They lay in the growing light. “New life,” Charlotte murmured after a while. He raised up on one elbow. “Is that supposed to mean something?” Charlotte was too tired to hide her feelings. “Everything means something, don’t you think?”

  “What does it mean, then?” His voice was rising, and she put her finger to his lips. She leaned close to his ear.

  “People are born and people die,” she said. “You can’t always control or predict that. Out there, people are waiting for you to direct them. It’s time for you to stop thinking about the things you can’t change and start thinking about the things you can.”

  Her finger was still pressed against his lips.

  “Daybreak is the child of your brain,” she went on. “It’s time for you to decide whether you want it to keep going, because right now it’s sliding out from under you.”

  She rose up from the bed and walked outside. Still in her nightdress and barefoot, she walked down the road past Webb’s house. She reached the path to Adam’s meditation rock and walked through the brush, stepping carefully among the weeds.

  No one was there. Had she been hoping to find Adam? She was too tired to face the question. Instead, she stepped onto the rock and stood at the water’s edge, listening to the grinding of the cicadas and the songs of the morning birds.

  The rock was slippery underwater and she gripped it with her toes. First ankle deep, then knee deep. The current pulled gently at her. It was not especially swift in this spot, but there was a slight tug. And when the water reached her thighs, it felt stronger, more insistent. But she could maintain her balance.

  Her cotton nightdress was heavy with water. She felt farther out with her toes. The rock seemed to slope endlessly into the river.

  When the water reached her breasts, she stood motionless. Little eddies swirled out from her. She held out her arms, straight from her sides, parallel with the surface of the river.

  One more step and her head was under, and now the current was almost too strong. She leaned against it, fighting to regain her balance.

  Underwater there was no sound but the rush of the river in her ears, or perhaps it was the sound of her own body, the blood rushing through her veins, the beat of her heart, the simple sounds of being alive that were usually drowned out by the echoing rattle of the world. She couldn’t hold her breath for long, so she stepped back, her hair dripping. Then she took a deep breath and stepped in again, holding herself under for as long as she could before backing up again.

  Charlotte wiped her eyes and remained in the water with only her head and neck showing. She watched the trees across the river as the sun began to peek through them.

  After a few minutes she began to feel slightly ridiculous and backed out of the river the same way she went in. But it was all right. She was soaked and dripping but felt better somehow. She sat on the rock and let the early morning sun warm her. When the nightdress had dried out a little, she walked up the dusty road back to the house.

  September 1859

  Chapter 17

  In late September they spread the shocks of hemp on the ground. George Webb showed them how to lay the stalks in even rows so the dew and frost would soften the outer shell and make the inner fibers pull away. After Charlotte’s scolding, Turner tried to act more like the leader of the colony again, but the murder of Smith had sapped him of the urge. Colony politics and projects bored him. He found himself daydreaming of Marie Mercadier’s soft young body and scheming ways to get her away from the village so he could experience its pleasures, schemes which rarely succeeded. There was always work, the never-ending work of crops, livestock, and simple upkeep of the colony, and in the rare occasions without work, there was someone else around. But they managed, now and then, to escape, and in those moments nothing else mattered. Turner told himself his sensual pursuits were for relief from the pressures of leadership, but in his heart knew this was a mere excuse. He was adrift but he liked the sensation of drifting.

  And Newton Carr put his water wheel into place. At the moment there was nothing for the wheel to run, so they let the shaft rotate freely in its keeper; when the time came for it to turn the ropejack, they would engage the gears. Carr and Turner stood on the bank admiring the wheel as it rotated slowly in the river, each paddle dipping into the water ever so slightly.

  “Not enough current here to run much of a machine,” Carr said. He sounded disappointed. “Still, I’d like to think of a use for it for during the months when we’re not making rope.”

  Turner watched the wheel turn lazily in the river. The paddles were about a foot square. He had imagined them bigger, but Carr had said they needed to be lightweight or else the whole thing wouldn’t turn. Even so.…

  “Maybe we could use it to lift water out of the river,” Turner said. “Put some little buckets on each paddle with a trough up at the top, something to tip the water into the trough, then run it out toward the fields.”

  “Never work,” said a voice from the road behind them. “Ain’t got enough elevation. Best you could do is dump water up here by the ditch, and you’d still have to carry it the rest of the way.”

  They turned to see who was offering the advice. Standing in the road was a young man, fifteen or so, small and wiry, his clothes ragged, wearing a battered hat that looked two sizes too large, but with such a rakish air that it seemed almost stylish. He grinned, a broad smile that verged on a smirk, and touched his brim.

  Something about his features seemed familiar to Turner. He squinted up through the underbrush.

  “You know me, Mr. Turner?” the young man said. Then it came to him. “Charley Pettibone!” Turner said. “You’ve grown up.”

  They clambered up the bank to the road, where Turner introduced Charley to his father-in-law. Carr surveyed the water wheel from the vantage point of the road. “I believe you’re right, son,” he said. “More of a slope here than you would think.”

  “Yessir, I’ve got a good eye for such.”

  “How’s your father?” Turner asked.

  “Dead, sir, I’m sorry to say,” Charley said. He added “sir” so automatically to his words that it came out “deadsir.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your father,” Turner said. “He was a good man.”

  “Got run over by a steamboat, is what happened,” Charley said. “We was tied up in the big river south of where the Arkansas comes in, going to cross over the next day to pick up a load at Rosedale. Steamboat come along in the night, hugging the bank real close on account of the low water, being summer and all.”

  “Good heavens, when did all this happen?”

  “Two months ago. He shoulda seen us. It was night and all, but they had lanterns, I seen ‘em. We were sleeping on the boat, and I felt the bow wake push us up against the bank. I woke up fast, let me tell you. Grabbed me a tree branch and hung on. And when it passed, their wheel sucked our boat right under. I hollered at Daddy, but he was a heavier sleeper than me. And the steamboat just went on by. Some feller at the rail just hollered, ‘Can’t stop! Can’t stop!’ And boom, just like that they were around the bend. I called out and called out, but I never got no answer. Found me a fork in the tree branch to sit on till morning and by then there wasn’t nothing to see.”

  “You should have reported this,” Carr said.

  “Wellsir, that ain’t so easy. And no steamboat captain is going to go to the sheriff or whatnot when he gets down to New Orleans and say, ‘Oh by the way, I think I run over a feller back up the river
a ways.’“

  “So what have you been doing since then?” Turner said.

  “Working my way aroundsir, just doing what I can find. All I got is right here.” He lifted up a canvas sack that was hung over his shoulder by a piece of string. “I’m traveling kinda light right now.”

  “You have any family?”

  “Nosir, not a one.”

  “So where are you headed?”

  “Wellsir,” Charley said, gazing up at the sky. “In point of fact, I was headed here.”

  “Were you now?” Turner said. “Do tell.”

  “It’s like this,” he said. “Morning comes, and I climb down out of my tree, fish around in the river and on the bank for what I can find, which ain’t much. Can’t find my daddy nowhere, thought he might have got hung up in the brush downstream maybe, but no such luck. I work my way through the swamps and finally get to a plantation, and the lady there gives me food and such. A few days go by, and the master rides me out to the main road in his buggy. He drops me off at the junction with a big sack of food, and he says, ‘Up the road is Pine Bluff, and down the road is Natchez. Take your pick.’ He drives off, and I stand there for a while. I get to thinking about everything you told us while we were on the boat, all about your town you’re starting up, new way of living, so on and so forth. And I think, all right then, up the road it is. And here I am.”

  “But Charley,” Turner said. “You have no family. How will you live? What will you do?”

  Charley blushed but looked up again, as if studying the clouds. “Wellsir, I was kindly hoping that you might take me in,” he said at last.

  The words “Of course, dear boy!” were about to burst from Turner’s lips. But he held back. Perhaps it was time to take people’s advice and think before acting. Instead, he said, “That will take a vote of the community. In the meantime, let’s get you some food.”

  At his house, he introduced the boy to Charlotte and listened as he retold his story. “And where have you been sleeping?” she asked him as she hurriedly stirred up a new pan of hoe cakes.

  “Barns, mostly, ma’am. Corn cribs. Couple of times people have let me sleep in their house.”

  “Well, we shall have no more of that,” she said. “You can stay here as long as you like.” She looked over at Turner. “Right?”

  “Certainly.”

  “We’ll make you a pallet here on the floor. Or perhaps you can sleep at Adam’s house.” She frowned. “No, that might not be a good idea. Adam has been feeling rather put-upon lately. We shouldn’t be volunteering him for things. You’ll stay here.”

  “Yesm,” said Charley, stuffing down hoe cakes as soon as they came off the skillet.

  “And then at meeting this week, we shall present Charley’s case to the community, don’t you think?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Turner said. Or perhaps not entirely exactly—he had assumed that they would board him with Cabot. All right, so Cabot was feeling skittery these days. Who wasn’t? And all that “Adam” this and “Adam” that didn’t feel quite seemly to him. It was over-familiar. A moment of jealous speculation passed through his mind, but he quickly discarded it as a silly notion. Charlotte and Adam were the souls of probity.

  Of course, so was he.

  Charlotte brought Charley Pettibone to meet Cabot before the community meeting, cleaned up and in a borrowed pair of Turner’s trousers. When Charley stepped inside and took off his wretched hat, he revealed a wad of curly brown hair that appeared never to have known a comb.

  “Your bed’s over there,” Cabot said, gesturing to a cot at one side of the room. “Hope you have better luck than the last man who slept in it.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Beaten, hung, shot by some of your fine local citizens.”

  Charlotte interrupted. She sensed skepticism, even irritation, in Cabot at this flat-faced Southern boy, attitudes that he was trying to hide. Jealousy of the attention she was paying to him, she supposed, with a shiver of satisfaction that she could still incite jealousy in a man, even one she had so firmly set aside. “Charley doesn’t need to hear all that right now.”

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” Charley said. “It’s a hard world, I know that.”

  “A hard world indeed,” Cabot said. “Well, we’d better get going. Can’t keep the people waiting.”

  Charley excused himself, leaving the two of them standing in the front room of the house, in a silence that suddenly became awkward.

  “You’re not leaving,” Cabot said.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  Cabot glanced nervously at the windows, but Charlotte already knew that the oilcloth that covered them only let in light, not sight. “Come over here,” she said.

  He crossed the room, and Charlotte took him by the shoulders. “I haven’t had the chance to tell you that I’m sorry for the loss of Mr. Smith. I know you and he were friends.”

  Cabot wrapped his arms around her, and for a long time they simply stood there, not moving, barely even breathing. Charlotte could feel his shoulders slump. He inhaled deeply. And then he was crying, his chest heaving, gasping in great gulps.

  “He was a good man,” he choked out between sobs. “I know he troubled us all with his sharp tongue and his odd ways, but God knows he didn’t deserve to die for it in a strange place, with none to comfort him. I know how he felt, alone among his enemies, a rope around his neck. There’s no greater fear. No greater sense of the cruelty of the world.”

  He turned away from her, wiping the tears from his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t keep you. They’ll miss us at the meeting.”

  “No, they won’t. Not for a while. And I don’t care.”

  They embraced again, and this time there was something different in it. Charlotte knew the feelings between them had not gone away, would never go away.

  She lifted her face to his.

  His kisses were hungry and mad, wild kisses that covered her lips and neck even as he smeared her face with his tears. In seconds they had gone from sympathy to passion, their bodies binding tighter until she could feel every inch of his flesh pressed against her from shoulder to knee.

  Even with no lamp lit in the fading autumn twilight, the room seemed too bright. She closed her eyes. That was better. She unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her palm against his chest, feeling it rise and fall beneath her hand.

  With no sense of conscious motion she found herself sitting on the edge of Lysander Smith’s cot, Cabot kneeling on the floor between her legs, and her hands embracing his bare sides beneath his shirt. Their kisses deepened and turned slower and more forceful. And then there it was—his hand, both his hands—under her dress, caressing the back of her knees and then moving up, caressing the underside of her thighs, touching her in places where only one man had touched her before.

  She needed to be closer. She needed to have nothing between them. Her fingers touched along the ridges of his spine.

  As she leaned into him, the cot tipped over with a crash and Charlotte fell forward, knocking Cabot onto his back on the floor. Her eyes popped open as she tumbled onto him, and the ridiculousness of their posture—Cabot flat on the floor, Charlotte above him with her legs straddling his torso, like a wrestler about to make a pin—made her laugh. She leaned down and kissed him again. Their eyes locked.

  “This is madness,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  Charlotte climbed off him then, turning her back as he buttoned his shirt and smoothed his hair. Cabot righted the bed with an embarrassed air and gestured toward the Temple, where they knew the community had begun to gather.

  “I need to—” he said.

  “Yes,” she repeated. He stepped quickly through the door, leaving her to straighten out her wrinkled dress in the growing darkness.

  At the weekly meeting, Charley told his story again. “So where are you from, actually?” Wickman asked.

  “Wellsir, that’s a good question,”
Charley said. “Great state of Arkansas is the best I can do. My daddy and I moved around a lot. He had a strong fondness for Fort Smith, but me, I only went there once.”

  “And how old are you?”

  Charley ran his hand across the top of his head. “Dang. Let me see. I think I was five in ‘49, so that would make me fifteen?”

  “Where’s your family?”

  “Ain’t got none I know of. My mama died with the birth fever, not with me but with what would have been my little sister, but she died too. Ain’t got no grandma nor grandpa I know of, nor uncles and aunts neither.”

  Cabot spoke. “No offense, but we’re not running an orphanage here. We want settled families. People who are going to build a life. Our standard has always been that new members have to bring two hundred dollars with them, but since you’re not a legal adult I’m not sure how that applies.” There was a murmur in the crowd at his words. “Harsh but true,” said a voice from the back.

  George Webb stood up. “I tell you what. You seem a likely young man. You can board with me. I could use the help. When you get to be a man, you can decide for yourself if you want to join the Daybreak community, and if you’re not working out, I’ll tell you to pack up and go. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” Charley said softly.

  Webb turned to the group. “Is that acceptable to everyone?”

  There was a general nodding of heads.

  “All right, then, that’s settled,” Webb said, and sat down.

  Charley turned out to be a good worker, an endless talker, and an incorrigible flirt. He took a quick eye to Marie, and now it was Turner’s turn to be irritated. “You’re just a boy,” he told him. “You shouldn’t be chasing after girls older than you.”