A Slant of Light Read online

  Who said, “Don’t play magic with me.”

  John Crow resumed mending net. “I like to be where it’s warm and dry, comes a heavy rain. That coffee all right? I brewed it for supper but the beans is from last winter.”

  “I learned in the war to take what comes and be glad when it does.”

  “And you have lost a mule.”

  “Just recent.”

  John Crow nodded. Set his net and mending gear upon the table and said, “The rain has not washed you clean as you might hope. Your war is not ended, is what I think.”

  Hopeton said, “You have heard what everyone else has. I can’t say I came from bad to worst, but more like worst to more worst.” He fell silent a moment pondering all John Crow had said. Then continued, “I didn’t come seeking you but to find a place to rest quiet. I thought you was at the lake.”

  “Did you kill the man stole your woman?”

  Hopeton paused. Then said, “I did what had to be.”

  “If a woman is so easily stole . . . Or was she?”

  “She’ll trouble me no more.” Hopeton took up his coffee, his body suddenly thick-limbed and leaden.

  “You think not?”

  Hopeton shook his head, not to deny the possibility but against his sluggish mind. He said, “It’s a cursed day.” Then added, “Those people she come from, followers of that Friend person. Her father is a lunatic, the mother little better.”

  John Crow said, “My father told me the Public Friend was the only white person he ever met, wasn’t crazy.”

  Hopeton shook his head. “I’d not know. Bethany, I knew her better than any other could, I surely thought. Twas Wheeler I miscalculated and that’s a fact. I’m in a terrible agony of mind, trying to figure it. Since the war, little in the world makes sense and once you see part of it that way, all else follows.”

  “It’s rest you need. Take the bed. I’ll finish my mending work silent as a footstep.”

  Hopeton stood. He was both rattled and about to fall down. “I thank you for the refuge. And the coffee and offer of a bed. But before I lay my head, I’d step outside to try and spy my mule.”

  John Crow nodded. “I think you should.”

  Hours later, Malcolm Hopeton woke to sunlight splintered by the summer leaves but casting through the open door and over the blankets under which he lay in a sweaty knot. Dredged from deep sleep, for moments he did not know where or why he was, thinking it only another bivouac in some abandoned house, slave quarters, the like. Then as quickly the prior day and night returned upon him and he touched fingers to the welt on the scars of his side and groaned, fresh images flickering behind his eyes to join the trove already there. When he moved a deer mouse rose from its nest far down the bed, gazing at him. He made to sit up and the deer mouse fled toward a crack where the wall met the floor and was gone. He stepped from the bed and rocked unsteadily upright. He still wore his trousers and the work shirt, thought then of how he might have made hay and felt the sharp pang—why had they chosen that day to return? Why not one or the other of them, alone? Wheeler he’d have dealt with the same, given the chance; but Bethany . . . ah, Bet. Why’d you not return on your own? Hard questions he’d have had but, he knew from Harlan Davis, harder answers from her. How it all had changed. By riding in together. From fear of him, he guessed and rightly so. He’d answered that question.

  His boots were beside a fresh fire in the hearth and a new pot of coffee stood beside them, his empty tin cup as well. He sat and laced his hard-used feet into the boots and filled the mug. This time when he did, he stood more easily, and took himself outside.

  John Crow was sitting on a plank bench under the shingle overhang, dressed in the same deerskins but in place of the vest wore a balloon-sleeved bright green open-necked shirt and wound round his head was a turban of faded scarlet.

  John Crow said, “A fresh morning.”

  “Have you seen my mule?”

  “First light he was rubbing his head against the door. I tried to catch him but he’d have none of me. I got hold of your rope he was trailing and we danced about the yard a turn or two but I was no match for him.”

  Hopeton looked, then back at the man. “What direction did he go?”

  “Off into the trees, downhill along the stream.”

  “I’ll walk him down.”

  John Crow stood, put his hands into the small of his back, and stretched. “I think, friend, you should sit here and drink your coffee. I’ll walk up the stream to the waterfall and watch out for what happens.”

  “No, no,” Hopeton said. “I’ll need my mule.”

  “He’s of no help to you now. Sit and rest. Refill your tin. But it’s time I leave, now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Take what peace the morning offers, friend,” John Crow said. “Can’t you hear the hounds?”

  Two

  August Swartout was not yet thirty years old and stood just under six feet with the muscled body of a man who worked a daily round. Both hair and beard he trimmed short, himself. His features had grown composed through the years of his grief and waiting, alert, sometimes inward-looking but not weighted or grim.

  He had all his teeth save for one rear molar that had fallen apart in the starkly dark year after Narcissa died, until the night, his jaw swollen as if he had an apple cupped within his cheek, he drank half a pint of whiskey and stood in his kitchen and used horseshoe nail pullers to clamp the remains of the tooth and pull free the roots from his inflamed jaw. The next morning his head throbbed and his eyes ached as he stood under the risen sun grown huge, worse for the whiskey than the missing tooth, his body chittering with cold from the gusting northwest wind, squalls of snow whirling around his farmyard. It wouldn’t be until the following spring when he’d hitch one of the horses to the jog-cart and ride to the Four Corners and hire the girl he knew of to keep house, in the way that he needed. It was not a mystery to him, but rather a fact of life, of how things worked, that the girl was not only known to him but connected in ways to his farm and land, and so to his life.

  On the late June morning after he’d delivered his butter to the steamboat and heard the news, he’d slapped the lines against the horse hauling the cart to get them more quickly home, and coming in at a high stepping trot he called out for Becca Davis to tell her the news of her brother, Harlan, already understanding that another unexpected change was entering his life.

  He lost his wheat to blight in 1857 but finished building the yellow-block stone farmhouse he’d promised his new wife, Narcissa, who was also his first cousin. They were natural together nearly as brother and sister since they grew up not a mile distant, born the same year. The wheat crop was cash money but otherwise they were not poor that winter, with oats and corn and ample hay to feed the livestock, the growing herd of blooded Ayrshire cattle for milk, butter and cream, the dry new cellar with racks of shelves for jams and jellies from fruit picked wild or the apple and cherry orchard, crocks of pickled vegetables and brined meats. From what he read in The Progressive Stockman there should be no fear of the blight returning the following year. So it was a matter of caching money for new seed, which was done by bits weekly as the butter was shipped by steamboat at the Four Corners, where it traveled around the Bluff and then down the Outlet Canal to Seneca Lake and the railhead at Dresden, then south to the Elmira market or north and then east on its journey to New York City. The Dresden broker made the decision based upon reports delivered by telegraph from further brokers in both places. Elmira had the advantage of proximity, New York of premium price. The sacks of wheat seed grew in August’s mind as the winter progressed.

  Following the Christmas Day meeting in the grand hall of the long-departed Public Friend’s manse, a meeting in silence save for when the attorney Enoch Stone stepped to the landing midway between the first and second floors and delivered a homily as muted and brief as the occasion called for, back at their new home with fires burning in the parlor stove and also in the kitchen’s g
reat fireplace that would hold logs three and four feet in length, eating a simple supper of bread, cheese and cold ham, she’d turned her round sweet beloved face toward him and informed him that come July they would welcome a new soul into Time. The ideas behind the wording were familiar as her bright countenance, perhaps more so, yet it took a blank moment before he understood the news. That night in bed she told him he’d been drop-jawed as an old woman. He responded by kissing her until she roused toward him, when he stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” she’d asked.

  “The baby,” he replied.

  “Don’t be silly. There’s no harm can come to it.”

  Still he insisted.

  He loved her so, and always had. And she loved him, both knowing they were intended for each other by Providence even before the summer they were eleven and were down in the gully between the farms belonging to their brother fathers, grown weary of filling baskets with the wild blackcap raspberries they’d been sent after, and so were on hands and knees making tunnels through the canes, close to the earth so most thorns and the spread of leaves and fruit were above them when they met face to face. Lips, cheeks and chins smeared with juice and she leaned the final inch and kissed him, then both pulled back and studied each other until he pressed forward and kissed her back. They did this for a while and never really stopped, only paused, interrupted by the other demands of day, life, school, season, all those only tipped toward the next hidden encounter, sledding the blizzard-drifted slopes of winter, feeding calves in one or the other barn, finding refuge in the woods or atop the great mounds of hay reached by ladders in the lofts, their breaths commingling and smoking with cold. A hasty snatch behind a door when both families joined for common meals. Until the September afternoon both were fourteen and walking home from the dame school of their people and hand in hand veered wordless from the road where it crossed the Kedron Brook, down among the high sycamores where the mottled trunks reared against the clear cloudless sky, the ground littered with shards of shed bark and yellow leaves, the yellow leaves overhead making a glowing golden world where after kissing she’d unbuttoned his trousers and tugged them down before lifting her dress and pulling off her knickers, then pulling him down and fumbling him into her with her hand. They lay clenched, newly made, mouths hungry. Only when the first swirl of cool air came over them did she speak words.

  “We’re not celibate now.”

  “I don’t think we ever were,” he said.

  “You’ll have to marry me.”

  “I think we already are.”

  Children of the Light of Christ, but also farm children, they knew full well what they were capable of but luck held and they were more cautious, discovering pleasures not possible to the creatures of the field. No one had told them of such things and so they owned no guilt beyond the shared good sense to remain concealed. In not so many years he would wonder just how concealed they were. And they were filled with light, all ways.

  Three years later they stood in meeting, from opposite sides of the hall, and announced their intentions. The slender handful of ancient celibates, women all, aligned like so many doves in gray skirts, cloaks and bonnets on the front-most bench nodded almost in unison; celibacy being the preference of the Public Friend but even that personage had not required it of followers, while others spoke of blessings, of new-made lambs of Christ. Finally both sets of parents stood and offered their own blessings upon the union, and in the eyes of the community and by the words of their charter, the two were married. It was less pleasant when they traveled with their fathers to stand before a clerk of the county court for the State of New York, who peered at them with a contempt disguised as curiosity.

  “How convenient. You both already bear the same surname.”

  August’s father, Samuel Swartout, said, “There’s none to be inconvenienced.”

  “You and the bride’s father, Emmanuel Swartout, you are cousins, perhaps? Of the same extended family?”

  Narcissa spoke up. “Sir. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ.”

  The man worked his lower lip against the inside of his upper teeth swiftly and said, “So my wife reminds me, although I see much to suggest otherwise.”

  Narcissa had been studying the printed slip with the vows of the state. “This bit here?” she said. “Till death do us part? Can we omit that?”

  “Why ever for? It’s been used forever.”

  “Death, one day, shall part us briefly. Our union is eternal.”

  “No, we’ll have the vows recited as the State demands. I leave eternal unions to the hereafter. Beyond that, if your children sprout tails, it’s naught to me.”

  The two brothers bought the farm of the widow Phoebe Davis, which adjoined their own holdings and which they’d already been farming by shares in the years since her husband died and she struggled to raise her own two children. The house was a ruin by then but the barn and outbuildings sound, the pastures fine, mature orchards, fields of rich mellow soil already known to them by hedgerow, fox den, wet spots, the obstinate boulder; which best suited to grains, which to grasses for hay, as well as their own history of rotation, of failure and success. Years earlier, Phoebe Davis had moved down to the valley with her children and rented rooms from an old man who’d lived alone all of his life, eschewing the celibates’ rooms and cabins about the manse of The Friend, a man both ferocious in zealotry and pacific in nature who only wanted to live as he believed the Lord intended him, who found solace in the words and wisdom of The Friend but went his own way nonetheless. Albert Ruddle. He’d known The Friend well, sought counsel and doubtless offered his own with the cautious challenge of one sure of his own wits but also not lacking in veneration. As he aged he knew it would be a question if he would be smothered by the collapse of a house he could no longer maintain. Too proud to shed himself of it, too sensible to allow pride to overrun him after a lifetime holding it at bay. He did not take boarders but opened his home to this family in need: He kept them and they kept him.

  Up the hill, August’s new house rose. Blocks of stone were brought by sledges hauled by four- and six-ox teams from the single quarry that yielded this hard yellow stone a dozen miles away in the still unsettled land south and west, a rough timbered country with no promises of good farmland. During the first explorations of the area some forgotten soul had found the outcrop and a pair of grand homes had been raised from it; August Swartout had admired them since he was a boy on those rare trips to town and when the farm was bestowed he presented well-executed plans for the new home, impressive in detail, and so his insistence upon the building material was accepted. Even those most given to the life of the spirit may indulge their children, perhaps more so when closely twained—not only the children but the builders. And from first vision on paper to the rising courses, knowing they were making a fine thing, pride moderated by knowledge it would withstand fire, great storms, piercing bitter winter winds, any manner of calamity. It would outlast them all. And so August and his father and uncle and male cousins and other men from up and down the valley gave their time that spring, fall, and winter and the next spring, as each of them could, to raise the house that August built for Narcissa.

  The spring and summer of 1858 the entire world, at least what small section of it was their domain, seemed given over entirely to fecundity, to increase and gain. Mild weather first came in March, allowing August easy access to pruning the orchards, also getting up the firewood for the next year. The cows bred for summer milking freshened with ease, the calves sturdy and bolting about the new grass come April, which brought enough steady rains to enrich what the March winds off Ontario had dried, then sunlit days with high sailing clouds, if any clouds at all. What plowing he’d not accomplished the previous fall he did now, long days on the new sulky plow with twin moldboards, which allowed him not only to ride, but at the end of the furrow, rather than traveling the length of the headland, to simply lift the one moldboard with its lever, swing the team about, drop the other,
and start again on their way. The days were lengthening and he worked them, usually with one of Narcissa’s younger brothers sent with a second team to drag the harrows hitched in gangs over the freshly turned ground, breaking the clods and smoothing the surface for planting. By the end of May his wheat, oats and finally the last of the corn was in. And still the weather gave what was needed, stretches of warm sunny days broken by slow soaking rains, the rare passing shower that might send the men to the barns to sharpen plow coulters and harrow teeth, before going out again. They cut hay in the well-drained south-sloping meadow below the orchard the first week of June, the earliest any could remember making hay.

  Narcissa grew large in her eighth month, a great mound of belly that she seemed to walk around even as she pushed it forward, her chestnut hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a tight bun to keep her ears and neck open to the cooling air. Her skin had always had an olive cast and took sun easily so by midsummer ever since she was a girl she’d been brown as a hickory nut, this year only changed by her own glow underneath that of the sun, as if she’d captured something of that light and infused her skin with it. She kept great meals on the table at breakfast, dinner and supper for the famished men, mid-morning and afternoon carried a pail and dipper to the fields, the chill well water infused with honey, cider vinegar and spices for vigor. There was no younger sister to help but her mother and his came alternating most days to manage the garden, to launder, to do the few tasks she could not. Only at evening, when August was finally in from the barn and fields, both fed and exhausted, would she sit on the wide porch that stretched along the back of the house, overlooking the gardens and orchard and soak her swollen feet in a tin basin of cold water.