Slant of Light

by Steve Wiegenstein

  From the shade of the cottonwood tree they could see the Temple of Community across the valley. Cabot’s gaze drifted to it. “Long way,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Charlotte. “It’s a long way.”

  He looked at her with a vague expression on his face. “True,” he said. She wasn’t sure what he meant, but nodded anyway and held the damp end of her apron against his brow.

  Then his eyes focused, and he seemed more intent. His face got the pugnacious expression it used to have when he was arguing with George Webb. “I meant to tell you.”

  He tried to draw a breath. His lips moved, but no more sound came out. His gaze drifted toward the river and settled there as Charlotte watched the light in them fade. And then he was still.

  Chapter 27

  Turner found her kneeling by Cabot’s lifeless body. The agonized tenderness of her expression sent bolts of emotion through him—fear, doubt, sadness, jealousy, all in rapid succession—but he held his tongue and watched as she wiped the dirt from Cabot’s face with her damp apron and murmured something that sounded like a prayer. She didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge him. If soft feelings had existed there, he had only himself to reproach. He backed away into the road.

  The troop of soldiers was at the ford, pulling bodies out of the river and lining them up on the bank. One by one, the people of Daybreak sifted out, some heading for their houses, some out in the fields, turning over the bodies of the guerrillas, and some just standing in front of the Temple.

  One of the soldiers walked down the road toward Turner. He waved his hand at Cabot.

  “That the fellow who ran out to warn us?”

  “Yes,” Turner said. They looked at him. “Fine thing,” said the soldier.

  Turner looked away with a sudden taste of salt in his mouth and pressed his sleeve to his face, welcoming the reek of burnt powder that filled his nostrils and stung his eyes. He supposed they all stank of gunpowder now, gunpowder and blood, the living and the dead. So this was what became of dreamers and idealists, to be shot down in what would be recorded as a meaningless skirmish of an obscure battle—if it were recorded at all. He felt a pang of envious regret. At least Cabot was granted the honest tears of a good woman.

  He turned back to the soldier. “Fine thing,” he croaked. “Who’s in charge over there?”

  The man looked back at the group of soldiers. “Hell if I know. Lieutenant’s dead, the rest of us are just greenhorns. There’s four more gangs of us coming down the hill. Captain’s up there somewhere.” The soldier walked back to his group, leaving Turner behind. He returned to Charlotte, who had covered Cabot’s face with her apron and was sitting motionless beside him.

  “I’ll go get the wagon,” he said in the softest voice he could muster, resting his hand on her shoulder for a moment. She turned away.

  He walked back to the Temple, where Harp Webb had been stretched out on a bench. He was still conscious, but his teeth were clenched and he drew his breath in short hisses. The rifle bullet had struck him in the lower abdomen. Turner pulled away his shirt and looked in at the smelly mess.

  “Harp, we’re going to have to flush out this wound,” he said.

  “What’s the point?” said Webb.

  “You never know. Men have recovered from worse. Looks like the door slowed down the ball. I’m surprised it didn’t go right through you.”

  “Wish it had,” Webb croaked out. “Saved me this shit.” The Mercadiers had gathered around.

  “Emile, why don’t you get your shoemaker’s kit and see what you can sew up in here,” Turner said. “You could use some fine thread and needles. See if you can find the rifle ball.”

  Mercadier looked at him dubiously, but shrugged. “All right. I can give a try.”

  As Turner was about to leave, Webb reached out feebly and touched his sleeve. “Bury me next to my daddy,” he said. “He’s the only family I got.”

  “All right,” Turner said. “If you die.”

  Marie followed Turner out of the Temple and took his arm. She took hold of his bloody hand. “Are you hurt?” she said.

  Turner looked at his hand, noticing for the first time that it was covered in blood. “No,” he said. “This is Harp’s, not mine.”

  “And Mr. Cabot is—?”

  He shook his head.

  “Here.” She drew a pan of water from the nearby well and bathed his hands in it. Her touch was urgent and gentle; he had almost forgotten how good the touch of her hand felt. One moment more, and then they released. She dumped the water on the ground and drew out another panful, turning toward the Temple.

  “Wash him out good,” Turner called after her. “Keep rinsing until everything’s as clean as you can get it.”

  He brought a wagon out of the barn and drove it to the road, stopping beside Charlotte and Cabot. By now more soldiers had arrived. A group of them walked up to them, one man out in front. He was tall and slender, with wavy black hair flowing from under a broad-brimmed hat, and he walked with the air of someone who is used to having men follow him.

  “I’m Captain Foutch,” the man said. “These boys have been telling me about your battle.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if it qualifies as a battle,” said Turner.

  “There was thirty or forty of them, Captain,” said one of the men. “It sure felt like a battle to me.”

  “Thirty or forty, eh?” said the captain. “Regulars?”

  “No,” Turner said. “Guerrillas. Their leader has been through here before, but I’ve never seen him with this many men. He generally rides alone.”

  “We’ll call it a battle, then. How many of them did we get?”

  “Four dead out here in the cornfield, and one wounded,” Turner said.

  The soldier spoke up again. “They carried off a bunch of dead ones. I’d say another five or six. And Jacobs is missing.”

  “Missing!” Foutch said. “How the hell can he be missing?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  The captain looked at the man skeptically. “Well, keep looking. He’s either run off or got killed. Boys, help get this man loaded onto the wagon, and then you can drive up and get ours. You got a cemetery around here?”

  Turner pointed up the hill.

  “Good,” said the captain. “Hope you don’t mind if we bury our boys here. We’ll give you their names.” He looked down at Cabot. “That was a damn fine thing he did. Civilian, too.”

  Charlotte stood up, her eyes wet. “In name only, sir,” she said. “He’s been fighting this war for us for half a dozen years.”

  Turner was about to add something, but the words he was getting ready to say—Cabot’s character, his sense of honor and duty—sounded hollow by comparison. He squeezed Charlotte’s hand as the soldiers loaded Cabot’s body into the wagon.

  The captain looked at the cemetery, and then his gaze traveled up the mountainside. “Those riders came down from there on you, did they?”

  “Yes sir,” said the soldier. “They used that churchhouse as a screen. We didn’t see them till they was all the way into that cornfield.”

  “Hm,” the captain said. “Your lieutenant should have detailed a half dozen men across the river first to set up a picket line before sending everybody. Remember that, soldier, because I’m putting you in charge of what’s left of this section.” He looked at the mountain again. “What’s the name of that hill?”

  Turner was about to say he didn’t think it had a name, but Charlotte spoke up. “It’s called Daybreak Mountain, captain. That’s because when the sun rises in the morning, it catches those pine trees you can see there up on top, and they light up just like candles and stay that way for several minutes. It’s a beautiful sight. And the town is called Daybreak, too.”

  “You have a good eye, ma’am,” Captain Foutch said.

  “Tell me, do you have news of Colonel Carr, in northern Virginia?”

  The man shook his head. “None recent. Last I heard, they were creeping down the Penins
ula about an inch a day. Kin of yours?”

  “He is my father.”

  The captain removed his hat and held it over his heart.

  At the river ford, seven men were stretched out in a row, each with his name on a piece of paper pinned to his coat. The missing soldier was found lodged in the water wheel. The force of the water was too strong for them to pull him out upstream, so they climbed on the wheel to make it turn; the dead man went under and then popped out like a cork on the downstream side. They loaded everyone into the wagon.

  “We’ll dig the graves if you’ll do the burial service,” Foutch said. “We had a chaplain but I sent him home, the reprobate. We need to move on down the road.”

  “Certainly,” Turner said. “But you’ll never catch those horsemen.”

  The captain laughed. “No, I expect they’ve rounded a few bends by now. But orders are orders. We’re supposed to proceed down this road and engage with whoever we encounter. Where does this road go, anyway?”

  A memory burst into Turner’s mind, of the hillman he and Charlotte had encountered on their wagon trip back from town some years ago, and he said, “Anywhere you want it to, if you take it far enough, I reckon.” But he laughed in response to the captain’s puzzled look, and said, “It’ll fork about fifteen miles down. Left takes you to Greenville, right takes you into Arkansas eventually.”

  Turner caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked toward the village to see Prentice walking toward them. He was wearing his gray uniform coat and kepi, and he had the ancient musket on his shoulder. “What have we here?” the captain murmured. By then Prentice had reached them.

  “I believe I need to surrender myself to you,” Prentice said. He laid the musket on the ground.

  “And why is that?” Foutch said, looking him over.

  “Private Benjamin Prentice, Missouri State Militia,” he replied, saluting. “I was on a foraging party and got kinda tied up here, then them guerrillas showed up and I never got back to my company.”

  “I see,” said the captain. “So you just thought you’d surrender.”

  “Well, seeing as how you fellers have won the field here, I thought it was the proper thing.”

  “Very well.” The captain spoke to the men behind him. “You four escort this prisoner up to town. We’ll leave his weapon here. Ours aren’t much better, but at least they’re ours.” He turned back to Prentice. “You’ll have company, I venture. Things seemed to be going our way when my company was detailed down this direction. Well, I need to see to my men.” Tipping his hat to Charlotte, he turned on his heel and walked away, leaving the two of them to walk back up the slope through the cornfield to Daybreak.

  “You go ahead,” Charlotte said. “I’ll be up directly.”

  As Turner walked away, a wave of bitterness swept over Charlotte. She should just leave it all. The villagers could manage themselves. Nothing mattered, names of mountains, names of people—who cared? Carry off the dead, place them in the ground, just another layer of dead on top of the layers that had come before, like the Indian mounds they so blithely plowed through. Another layer of compost to fertilize the ground, that’s all they were. Temples, houses, dreams, loves—everything would end up dead and buried, forgotten relics for some unthinking person to stumble across and ignorantly speculate upon someday, just as she had done when she found the arrowhead. And that if they were lucky. More likely, they would be forgotten entirely. Ignorance and foolishness were their inheritance, and destruction and waste were to be their legacy.

  She turned her face to the village, where she could see Turner walking among the stunned townspeople. They were examining the damage, tending the wounded, consoling each other. The wagonload of human loss was creaking up the mountain to the graveyard, followed by a troop of soldiers who had fetched shovels from the barn. Life going on, ants on a hill treading around the bodies of their dead. And there was Newton, seeking his mother, struggling against the tight embrace of Frances Wickman as she tried to calm him.

  Charlotte wiped her eyes, took a deep breath, and walked back toward the village.

  They buried the soldiers that evening, four graves, two to a grave, with Wickman taking care to note which name went with which grave. “I’ll carve out markers for them this winter,” he said. The Federals had only dug graves for their own, so the Daybreak men spent the afternoon digging three more graves—two for the bushwhackers and one for Cabot.

  “How should I mark these two?” Wickman asked.

  “Just say ‘Unknown Confederates,’“ said Turner.

  Cabot’s burial was saved for the next day. “We should bury him at sunrise,” Charlotte said. “It was his favorite time of day.” So as the sun was slanting through the frost-tipped needles of the pine trees the next morning, Cabot’s oak box was lowered into its hole. Turner had not prepared anything to say, but as they stood around the grave, it did not feel right just to start shoveling dirt. So he drew a deep breath, opened his mouth, and hoped some words would come out.

  “This man could have lived anywhere in the world,” he said. “He came from a fine old family, and he had a fine education. But he wasn’t satisfied with living out the life his ancestors handed down to him. He wanted to live the life of his own choosing. So he came out here.

  “He wanted to find out for himself what kind of light could be drawn from a human soul. And by God, the soul is a bright thing when you rub off the dirt that’s on the surface. His was never much tarnished to begin with, for whatever reason. Those of you who came out here in fifty-seven will remember how he became a leader of the group, not because he had any great need to run things, but because whenever he saw a job that needed to be done, he just started doing it, no questions asked. And the next thing you knew, you were joining in and helping.

  “He was no farmer. But once he learned the difference between a corn shoot and a grass blade, he was out there hoeing with the best. He was a fine man, and I’m glad I knew him. I’m glad we all knew him. He wasn’t one of ours when he came here, but he’s one of ours now. Goodbye, friend, you will be missed.”

  Turner stepped back from the grave opening. The sun was full up in the eastern sky now, warming their faces. He picked up a shovel and got ready to work along with everyone else. But in the moment before they started to fill the grave, Charlotte knelt down. She took a handful of bittersweet from her pocket and tossed in the bright orange berries.

  “They’ll not grow, buried so deep,” Turner said to her gently.

  “Those are for him,” she said. “I’ll plant some for the rest of us tomorrow.” She walked away, her head bowed, her hair shining in the morning light.

  Harp Webb had passed out when Emile began sewing up his intestines, but to everyone’s surprise regained consciousness later that night. They gave him some water and broth, and by the next day, the day of Cabot’s funeral, he was sitting up in bed, examining the stitches across his belly, and demanding to be moved back to his own home. But after two more days infection set in, and two days after that they were back at the cemetery, lowering one more body into a hole in the ground, into the universal forgiveness of the grave.

  By that time the community had begun to recover from the shock of being rounded up and held in the Temple. The children were venturing out to play again, but they were nervous and stayed close to home. They repaired the shattered windows with oilcloth; there was no telling when they might get glass again.

  But shattered spirits were harder to repair. The children’s fearfulness did not go away with the passing of the weeks. Charlotte heard phantom hoofbeats in the night, and the knowledge that she was not alone in this apprehension gave her no comfort when she awoke, sweaty and startled, her muscles tense and her nerves straining. The bloodstained earth, the bullet fragments, the trampled fields, all forced the villagers into recognition that the war was real. It had come to them and would not go away for any amount of wishing and good will. Hildebrand and his men had ridden south for now, but they coul
d return any day bringing more destruction—and this time it would be directed at Daybreak.

  Charlotte tried to manage her grief at the loss of Adam, knowing it served the community no good to have her wrapped in mourning when so many weaker souls needed comfort. But she couldn’t shake it. Every place in the village, every spot in the fields, was a place of memory for her. The place in the road where they had talked about politics. The doorway where she had stopped for a moment to watch him from a distance. The Temple where they had finally danced. Everywhere had meaning and everywhere had pain. In the night when Turner reached for her, she accepted his embrace, but the image of Adam would not go away, even if she had wanted it to.

  November 1861/January 1862

  Chapter 28

  Before they knew it, November had come. The harvest was over, and the days grew quiet. From time to time, companies of soldiers, troops of cavalry, would pass by on their way south; and from time to time more ragged groups would return, bearing their dead and wounded, or leading a clump of prisoners. Marie Mercadier organized the children to hand gourds of water to the men as they passed. The war energized her; with troubles at every hand that were greater than her own, she found release from the prison of scrutiny that had bound her and threw herself into soldiers’ relief and sanitary associations.

  A new garrison commander came to town and then disappeared, and then another. No one bothered to learn their names anymore. Holding an inconsequential Missouri town was no path to advancement; the only way up the ranks was to win a significant engagement. The guerrillas would not hold still long enough for that. They dodged the organized companies and took to raiding instead, picking off soldiers home on furlough, stopping trains to search for troops, killing informers and collaborators. It was worse out west, everyone said; the Federals and the irregulars had reached a state of total war, and you could night-ride from Lamar to Independence, navigating by the light of burning fields and farmhouses. The troops saw little point in chasing after these ghosts. They held the towns and tried to keep the railroads running, but beyond that—why trot out to an ambush whenever another farmer got hung?