A Slant of Light Page 13

  When there was no response other than downcast eyes from Harlan, August elaborated. “The parents of Bethany Hopeton.”

  “I know who they are.” The boy paused, then looked up and said, “Would you have me come with you?”

  “Why no, I hadn’t thought so. Unless you wish to.”

  “I druther not. I can’t see any reason they’d welcome me.”

  “Whatever Lawyer Stone thinks, whatever he said, I wouldn’t assume David and Iris would think ill of you. Among much else, you were not responsible for what happened to Malcolm Hopeton’s farm. And should not feel you have to answer to those events. But, that said, I was intending to go alone, for my own reasons.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “I can’t say. There’s always work to be done, as I’m sure you know. But nothing pressing. Perhaps you might like to walk down and loll by the lakeside, take the plunge into the cool waters there? Something of that sort? A bit of rest is what I’m saying. You’ve earned it.”

  Harlan was quiet a moment, then said, “I want to go visit Mister Hopeton again. That first time, I ain’t never ever even imagined him that way. I need to make sure he knows I’m ready to help. However he needs.”

  August regarded the boy. “What if there’s no change?”

  “I’d take that as I find it.”

  August was quiet a moment, then said, “One of those mules rides, is that not so? We know Malcolm rode off on one. Do you know which one?”

  “He always rode Bill. But while he was gone to the war I messed around with both of em and maybe it’s only me, but Bart’s a better fit for the road.”

  August stood then and pulled his purse from his trouser pocket. He reached within and dug and lifted out a bright, thick coin and held it out. He said, “Take that.”

  “You keep giving me money I ain’t earned.”

  “By my lights you’ve earned it and then some. Now listen, that last time you went, that bit of money made a difference, didn’t it?”

  Harlan said, “Paid my fare, but I ain’t taking any boats if I ride the mule. And while it was nice to have, I’d not’ve perished if I hadn’t been able to buy some food on my way back. I’m all right.”

  August said, “The point is once you step off into the unknown you never truly can guess what you might need.”

  “But that’s a double eagle.”

  “It is. And this evening, or whenever it may be, you hand it back to me, we’ll both be happy. But between now and then both you and I’ll know you’re well set against what they call contingencies. You know what that is?”

  “I think Bart is all the help I need against contingencies. But I’ll slip that beauty down into my boot just so I can walk around on it. That way, anyone asks my age I can tell em, Well, I’m over twenty. And I won’t be lying.” Harlan let a grin slip over his face and August did likewise as the boy pocketed the coin.

  Then both stood awkward a moment. Both ready to step into an unknown day, both unsure. August was again grim, Harlan in a surging confusion. So he spoke first.

  “You see a way, let her folks know how sorry I am.”

  August said, “You go on and see if you can help Malcolm Hopeton. Not a one of us can fix all that’s wrong in the world.”

  He stepped around Harlan and went down the yard to the house and came out almost immediately with his jacket and straw hat on and went to the barn to hitch a horse to the cart. Harlan watched until August drove out, then cleaned up around the buttery and closed it tight. He’d have changed his shirt but not so much as to have his sister question him and so went on to the day pasture and led the mules to their pen in the barn and separated them, which was a job until it was not. He brushed down Bart and fitted him with a bridle and rope reins and the mule understood the boy was about to torment him once again and grew still and watchful. Harlan unlaced his right brogan to tuck the heavy coin within and the mule took this moment to swipe its head about to clamp teeth to the upturned bottom presented and Harlan turned and swatted the mule on the nose. Bart rose up and settled again with his legs spraddled and his neck strung high, nostrils blowing.

  Harlan gathered up the reins and tugged the mule toward the rear door of the barn, intending to cut crosslots toward the road and walking along but not looking back as they exited the barn, said, “Don’t have a hissy. You bite my ass, I’ll clobber your nose. You should know that. There now. You ready to ride along a bit?”

  It was a fine morning and despite some nervousness about what he might find in town, Harlan found himself riding along in high spirits, hard not to be with the easy stride of the mule, the light clear and the roadside swarming with orioles, brown thrashers, cowbirds, a flutter of a half-dozen or so goldfinches. A myriad of small blue and black butterflies rose off the road surface around him and his passing mule, then were gone. Why they chose that spot? The wonders of the Lord. As he came down into the valley above the Four Corners and crossed the brook, a red-winged blackbird rose up from the reeds along the water, fussing and crying at him, protecting her nest down in the reeds. A pair of crows rose and fell as they rowed the air above the fields of young corn, oats, wheat and barley that spread upon the valley floor. Men at work making hay. The hay fields already cut bare had lost the blond stubble after the rain and glowed a luminescent green. But it was only passing Albert Ruddle’s old house, now abandoned and used to store hay from the neighboring fields that Harlan fully understood that he was, in most all ways, back at home—his not-quite-four years up in Milo at Malcolm Hopeton’s farm not so bleak and dire, so endless, as they’d seemed at the time. He knew a comfort and ease he’d not felt during those four years—not even at the early start of them when it seemed he’d lighted in a good place; and not now, when, he knew, should fortune turn so, he’d be back up there on the farm and happy to be there. Greatly so, he thought, as he spit down into the dust, ruminating. But this was home, the land he’d come out of. For the first time in his young life he understood that it always would be.

  A heron lifted out of the stream and flapped off and away, legs stretched behind like the sticks of a broken kite. He rode on, the mule happy also it seemed to him, at least happy with the job. Easy for a mule. They climbed up the valley toward the County Farm road and there over his right shoulder he saw the bulk of the Bluff splitting the Crooked Lake, the long high massif of land looking in the gathering heat haze as some huge creature crouched forever, caught before a pounce. Below on the waters he watched the white skiffle of wavelets turned by a breeze he didn’t feel up here, also the sails of boats plying up and down the lake, the larger, more squat side-wheeler and its trail of coal smoke from the stack. The same boat he’d ridden just days before, or one of the fleet of three, all identical unless you knew the schedule, which he did not, or were close enough to read the painted legend of name: Catawba, Keuka, Seneca. It was a busy land, busy water, too. All a-churn with life.

  He came down into the town and let the Bart mule snort and toss his head as they made way through the press of crowds upon the streets and on toward the courthouse. Some few looked up and let their eyes follow after him; never before had he been a known figure, and it caused a strange discomfort within. At the courthouse there was much milling and men striding about compared to the first time he was there but he only kicked up the fractious mule and passed around the building to the back side, where the horse sheds stood. These too were mostly full and he felt a twitch of panic, wondering if all this activity was related to Malcolm Hopeton, if he was someway too late. Court was in session, this much was clear. When he found a space in the sheds for the mule, there stood a pair of men outside the shed, holding forth in argument—the one stating he’d spill blood or die before accepting such a decision and the other allowing how it might be so and the better for those left living.

  Harlan tied the mule and fetched an armful of hay from the common rick midway of the sheds and walked around to the grand front entry, where he paused again and took breath and lifted h
imself on tiptoe to settle back down and feel the weight of the double-eagle coin under his foot, giving him the final courage and he walked up the broad granite steps and then through the double doors, propped open to the day.

  Where he stopped and watched. Within as without, all was a great hive of busyness. None looked at him at all. He passed through the entry and was in the sheriff’s office proper and here it was much the same or more so. All a-bursting with furious business, all engaged. He looked over at the door that led down to the basement and there was not a soul near it or paying attention. He ambled slowly back and forth again, sidling sideways, until he was leaned back against that very door, his arms crossed over his chest and one foot kicked before him, the other crossed over it and still it seemed no one in the room paid him notice.

  So after a long moment he finally turned and tried the door, which opened silent and easy upon him. So much that he paused one last time to glance over his shoulder but there was not a man watching and he stepped through and pulled the door just-to behind him, not wanting to hear the click of a lock.

  There, then, he stood in sudden near-dark, pausing a moment for the outcry without. When it did not come and his eyes had made out the stairs before him, he walked down, his brogans clapping upon the raw old planks but otherwise silent. And this way he came into the basement and found Malcolm Hopeton in his cage.

  Hopeton sat on his bunk. He wore new black trousers and a new collarless white shirt, but despite these garments his appearance had worsened. He was barefooted and had not shaved, his hair sprang about his head, dull brown shot through with white, and his short beard was also stippled. In his days in the cell his skin had lost its color and was a dirty parchment gray. His eyes were sunken and dark-rimmed and his great farmer’s hands lay in his lap as if they were separate from him. His head had been turned to watch Harlan descend the stairs and he kept those eyes upon the boy but was silent, making no sign of recognition or even acknowledgment.

  Also now there was a three-legged stool half a dozen feet from the cage. Harlan sat upon it and studied the man before him, who endured this as if he’d done so before and would again and cared nothing for such appraisal. Harlan met and held the man’s eyes and thought again of fish, the dead eyes of a fish pulled from the depths of a lake, eyes glazed open as if behind those eyes lay worlds forever frozen and lost, worlds not seen by man.

  “Howdy, Malcolm,” Harlan said. He’d never addressed the man by his Christian name but did so now as if the man had no other. “I wanted to come by and see you. I rode that Bart mule to town. At least for me, he rides better than Bill. Until this business gets cleared up I’m staying on the farm of a good man name of August Swartout out near Jerusalem. My sister keeps house for him, is how I ended up there. And the team of mules was brought to me to tend also. They’re good mules, settled in and working as they need to. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about em. But I wanted you to know how I’m situated for the moment. Until we get this business cleared up. Which is also why I come back to see you. There’s been a lawyer come to see me and while I don’t care for him someways, I do believe he means you well. What I’m saying is that there stands a chance that the truth of Amos Wheeler and everything else might come out. You and I know what that truth is. And, well, I want you to know I’m ready to stand in a courtroom and swear to what I seen Amos do. How it was.”

  He then sat silent and silence greeted him and held within the room. The eyes of the man through the bars gazed toward him. In this silence he smelled the room, the reek of human waste, mold upon the rafters, some other dank effluvium seeping up from whatever chambers or tunnels lay beneath this basement.

  Malcolm Hopeton looking through him where he sat on the stool as if beyond the sunken stone foundation into some far distant clear day never to be seen again.

  Harlan said, “I seen it all, you know I did. I was there. You know it yourself; fact is, you knew it enough someway to ask me to be there. I’m here of a purpose, Mr. Hopeton. I always was. Can you see that?”

  After the boy had come the first time and run away, the sheriff and two of his deputies had come down and beaten him to silence. The one man was named Smith. A lineage of men made to smite, and he and his helper had. The sheriff had stood back and watched and all three left together. Malcolm had known a man named Smith in the war and had watched him die. Listened to him die. Crying and gasping in pain-streaked moans and calling upon God to save him. As with most such entreaties overheard during the course of those years, God had failed to intervene as if He were not there at all. Some men survived; but Malcolm deemed those holding luck, proximity to surgeons, luck again, the minor severity of wounds, even a man of unusual strength with wounds of such outrage that those likewise afflicted were already dead but that man survived. He never once believed God had a hand as to intervene in such matters. So life had informed him, from when he was but a boy not so different from this eager, earnest boy before him, when his family, parents both and siblings and those of wider reach—uncles and aunts, cousins and his own grandmother—had fallen to the sway of a prophet, or not a prophet, but simply and deeply and with great conviction a man deranged by his particular absorption and also perhaps by his own great need to be anointed by the Lord, and had thus made ill testimony. Then, too, thirty and more years ago the Lord had deigned to answer those calls upon Him. Had left bereft and impoverished fools upon the top of a high hill, gathered there to be closer to heaven as the Kingdom of the Lord was to be offered to them. Except it had not been offered. The Lord had ignored those who would love Him most.

  The Lord either was not such a thing or did not care. For all of his life this formula amounted to the same thing. Trust to nothing but what you are able to make.

  All this he’d done with Bethany. He’d staggered the war through, always this hope to return to love, his own love, the one who also had known the fury of men wrought by the Lord. And the one with whom he’d made a new life, not so much disregarding God as both having learned that if there was any God, He made himself manifest in simple marvelous works of creation all around them, the beasts and grasses and trees, the sun, which made life quick, and the distant stars, mystery enough to ponder right there, far overhead but within sight. Most all of wonder could be touched; and if not touched then seen, witnessed. Also the wonder of the countless ways man and woman joined together. In daily rounds of work, shared or divided; in words of conversation, discussion, argument, passion. In the bed, that joining seeming at times to be the creation of a single creature from halves, other times both each yearning ever deeper toward the other, those times also more brute but not brutal. And the slender handful of failures, or hopes advanced and then crushed by a flush of blood and even then, when they well might’ve, never once did one turn to the other and wonder if this was a divine condemnation upon the two of them; for it was not the Lord at all but the hands and hearts of men that made destruction and both also knew some creatures breed with ease and humans not always so. What worries they held private concerned awful practicalities. Was his seed thin or lacking someway? Was her womb barren of eggs, or were those eggs that caused her monthly flow deformed someway? They knew such tragedy had fallen upon others. And possible as well, some combination of strain upon both but with time and effort would meet and match. A child would issue.

  Meanwhile the country seethed and boiled and then sundered and he knew it must not be allowed to remain so. This division was not hope for two to be made of one but a great hope destroyed. And so he went to war. She’d begged him not to go.

  She’d stood in their kitchen once the day’s work was done and the hired man fed and gone off to his abode in the woods and had begged him not to go, to pay for a substitute as so many others had done. She’d dropped to her knees and entreated him. And all he’d seen was any wife faced with such a prospect and had assured her, had finally left the kitchen and her sobbing to walk out alone into the summer night and stand upon the rise of land beyond his peach
orchard facing south and studying the stars hanging down to that horizon. And a pale shadow of thought came to him and he misunderstood it or perhaps did not, but in the weeks ahead he queried about and then one day had driven most of the way across the country to find the young man he’d heard word of and had hired him and brought him home. Because his wife had told him that she and the one hired man could not do it. Could not hold it all together, the two of them alone. He thought he’d seen the truth in her words.

  He thought as much throughout the war. He had no reason not to and many reasons to hold tight his vision of his home, steady and strong. Intact and merely awaiting his return.

  Then he walked back in, his brain thick and red-rimmed with the vestiges of his years away but also with the traitorous, foul killing of the president. That great man undone by desperate fools. The war done but most clearly not done. And so he walked back into his own promise of peace, hope and desire. And none of any of it was there. Stolen and swept away. His own life assassinated.

  Things fell apart.

  The blood from her nose and mouth where she lay cast upon the ground. By his own hands.

  His grandfather had told him, “The Lord had nothing to do with it. It was people, and what they will get up to.”

  “I wish you’d talk to me. Not just set there staring. I’d help you, I told you that. I seen what Amos done, I seen it all. Like I said, I’ll tell any man that needs to know.”

  “Harlan Davis,” he said and stopped. His words came at great cost and he measured them through his breathing, feeling his chest heave and fall. He’d not spoken to anyone since his arrival in this cage, not to any living person and certainly not aloud. Otherwise he’d been in a flurry of communication. So he breathed and pulled words forth between breaths.

  “Yes? Yes sir. Mr. Hopeton?”

  “You say you’re in a good place? That the man is good and you’re welcome there?”