A Slant of Light Read online

  The early evening sunlight ribboned across the orchard pasture, making bands of light and dark where the cows grazed and the mules also. On the trees where the light struck, small globes glowed almost yellow, the young apples now visible. Swallows wafted above and then swiftly darted among the trees and up again and gone toward the barn and the nests that lined the rafters of the dairy, the mud-and-daub structures where the small speckled eggs were hatching and the young naked birds gaped and cried during afternoon chores. The same birds, adult and young, awake and striving at first light. Life ferocious and yearning.

  Harlan carried his own tin cup of water when he joined August, who was tipped back in his rocker, his cup untouched resting upon his crossed knee, his right arm lifted into the air, holding the cheroot, smoking. August remained silent as Harlan pulled another rocker up and sat, drinking a bit from his cup and then leaning to set it upon the boards and after a moment of lifting first one foot then the other lifted both and propped them against the porch rail and settled back into his chair.

  August said, “I don’t know much about any of this business. The rumors and gossip, somewhat, but I discount them mostly.”

  He felt the boy stiffen, come to a halt from his already mild rocking. Harlan said, “I’m sorry. I never meant to bring it upon you.”

  “No, no. You misunderstand. I told you once and will once more but please don’t have me do it again: You’re most welcome here, Harlan Davis. And besides that, I’d do whatever I can to assist you.”

  “It’s Mr. Hopeton needs assistance. And I can’t see how to do it, the state he’s in.”

  August blew a smoke ring that floated perfect and he blew another he watched go through the first, not proud but thoughtful as if directing his gaze thus allowed his mind greater play. He said, “As The Friend taught, we are caught in Time, but time also catches and holds us. I’m thinking of this man I never knew, at least not yet. And how all of this with him came to pass. He went away to war, for, as most men do, a host of reasons. And he stuck that war out. This county is filled up with men who did the same but also those who went and fulfilled their obligation and came home. But he stayed. Now, I’m a peaceable man myself. War is not for me, sanctioned murder is how I see it, even if, and I do double back upon myself here, I recognized it was a great and necessary evil. To halt the traitors that would rend the country asunder, all in the name of a most terrible estate—that of keeping other souls in bondage. For that matter I did my part. Paid my forfeit and shipped my grain and butter to the effort. And made my prayers, daily. Other words, I did what I knew to do.”

  August still looked off away, smoking. The smell of heated working yeast came down the hall and out upon the porch. Bread in the oven or bread on the final rise—at a small remove could be either one. The high eastern clouds belly-lit by the slow falling sun but the land all now shades of blue and charcoal, pigeon breast feathers, small orbs as if caught daylight in the flowers against the porch. Even shades of winter gloaming hiding twixt the heat of day and falling night. Harlan was sitting quiet, lost in worry, lost in his own thought. Perhaps even wondering what August was saying. Or asking. For August himself was suddenly unsure.

  “I wish he had come home. He could’ve. Even before his enlistment was over, he had the chance. And if he’d took it, none of this ever would’ve happened. But he didn’t.”

  A mournful, sad boy.

  Gently August said, “Why didn’t he?”

  Harlan now also gazed off toward the slow-falling night. He made fists of his hands and lifted them and rubbed his eyes. August was about to speak, to say never mind, it can wait, when Harlan dropped his hands into his lap and worked his fingers over and around each other, as if rubbing worry or soreness from them.

  “He found me, I still don’t know how, after he’d signed on with the Keuka Rifles the summer of sixty-one; they was set to march off that fall. He hired me and we had some months together all four of us before he went. And it seemed clear: Missus Hopeton and Amos Wheeler was to do the job of running the farm and I was to be the hired man that Amos had been. It wasn’t that simple but that was the general idea. And late September, just before he went off on the train, he took me aside and told me he counted on me, counted on me to do my part and also to keep a eye on things. The very words he used. They stuck hard in my head but I have to tell you I don’t know if he meant em the way I came to understand or was just trying to make sure I knew I was important to keeping things going. Eighteen months. That’s what he signed on for. If he’d done that and walked home it would’ve never come to what it did. Those first couple a years we all three of us worked that farm mostly the way it needed to be done. Looking back there was small things I understand different now but it was mostly all on the up and up.

  “What turned things was Hopeton himself. Or more true to say he made a opportunity without knowing he was doing such. He thought he was doing another thing altogether. Thought he was doing the right thing. See, a year into his enlistment he was wounded. September of eighteen and sixty-two. The battle of Antietam.”

  Harlan paused and looked at August and asked, “You know about that one?”

  “I might not’ve been a soldier but I followed the war. Close. Not just The Chronicle but also Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, Harper’s Magazine. I read them all. That was a terrible battle, one of the worst, early on. What many of the rest looked like as time went by.”

  “I guess. I didn’t read so much as you, just know what I heard. And what he told me these last couple months. I guess I learned the most during that time, though it’s all mixed up in my head now. But this is what I do know. Because it didn’t just happen to him but happened to me also.

  “At Antietam he was wounded. He told me the whole story, how he and a mess of Union boys was up on a hill and there was a road at the base of the hill and across the road some woods where the Rebs was dug in. And those Union boys went down that hill to attack the Rebs. But what no one knew until it was too late was there was a big cut in the base of the hill above the road. And the Rebs just started cutting em down and the Union men was stumbling and falling as they went, being killed also but many of em falling down into the road still alive but carried along with it all. And Malcolm Hopeton was among that first wave of men but back enough so he didn’t know what was happening until he tumbled into that mess of dead and dying men on the road. Where the Rebs had come out of the woods and was killing men, sticking them like frogs with their bayonets and long knives and clubbing em with their rifle stocks, all which was quicker than reloading. Anyway, there he come down the hill all in a jumble but with his rifle up ready to shoot when he felt a burn like a bee-sting on his right thumb and looked down and seen that thumb had been shot right off, where it was propped up ready to pull the trigger, and then down he went, tumbled down that bank. Said he looked up and a Reb was standing over him and stabbed him with his bayonet and it hit a rib and the Reb pulled it out and heaved up ready to do it again when a pair of Union boys fell dead across Mr. Hopeton and that was all he knew until long after that morning.

  “He woke sometime in the night and was laid out on the ground with other wounded men outside a big tent glowing like a lantern. He had a bandage over his right hand and was wrapped all around his middle with more bandages soaked right through so they looked black in that pale light. Said he lay there listening to the screams from within the tent and the scrape and rasp of saws as the surgeons done their work. The other men around him groaning with pain or crying out for help, water, Mother, all such things. And he told me he turned his head sideways and seen a pile looked in the shadows like a mighty heap of cordwood thrown all which ways and realized it was parts of men, arms and feet, legs, a great many legs, at least good pieces of em. And how he then recalled the face of the Reb that tried to stick him all those hours before—said he’d recognize that man anywhere and everywhere.

  “About that time one of the sawbones came along that row of men and was stopping to check on e
ach one. He come to Malcolm and changed the dressing on his hand and he said the doctor was kind and tired as he ever seen a man but still the doctor finished his work and looked Malcolm in the eye and told him, ‘Your war is done.’

  “As if delivering good news. But he, Mr. Hopeton, lay there thinking about that and also thinking about the face of the Reb who’d undone him so. And made up his mind he’d find that man one way or another, or enough like him, and see that their war was done. Said he felt that and felt it also as a great sadness in him.

  “After that night he was taken to a hospital in Maryland where he spent a month recovering all the way. Which I gather was tougher than he told, that his wounds to his belly was more considerable, since it took so long. And let those people keep telling him how he was going home. He didn’t argue with none of them but only waited. Then one day when he knew he was able he slipped out of there and hiked until he found what he was looking for, which for a hospital was not that far. He was looking for a quartermaster of one of the wagon trains that run a army, you get down to it. Not a bit of army is any good without a train. And he told the man he was about to be cashiered from the infantry but wanted to sign on as a teamster. Said you might need a thumb to fire a rifle but any fool with horse sense could manage a team. All of which is true.

  “But the quartermaster looked him up and down and asked something like did he know horses, teams and hauling.

  “And Malcolm spoke back and said I know horses and hauling but if you’ve got em, I prefer mules. And that was that. He was in until the end of the war.”

  A silence grew out between them now sitting in the full charcoal throat of dusk, the night air not cooled yet, the smell of bread upon them and fireflies winking off in the orchard. August’s cheroot had long died and he’d held it dead in his hand throughout this telling. Now he flicked it into the flowers against the porch and hitched upright in his chair, feeling the work of the day stiffening within his shoulder and arms, his thighs.

  He spoke, quietly. “So was it revenge upon that one fellow that drove him? Blood lust?”

  “No,” Harlan said. “I misstated. He said it was when he saw the fury in that man’s face that he understood truly what the war was about. Before it had been simple, to keep the United States together, to end slavery if that could be done. But he said it was in that man’s face he understood it was a war against evil, pure and simple and as wretched as evil can be. How evil rises up and distorts men’s vision, their understanding. How that fellow and all his other Reb soldiers and their armies and the states and the Confederate government, the whole of it, was saddled by evil and driven by it. He told me this one evening; we’d planted what seed corn he’d been able to buy since there wasn’t none held back from last fall and we was beat but happy, the way you and I felt this afternoon, getting that hay in the barn. We’d drunk water from the trough and were spraddle-legged against the side of the barn in that good May sunlight when he told me all this.

  “He told me it was thinking about that man, lying on the ground outside the hospital tent, when it came to him: What if the war was lost. If the Rebs won. What sort of world it would be, what sort of country we’d live in, forever. And then how he wondered if it might be—and he leaned over and pushed my shoulder with his stunt hand as he said it—what if by some action of fate, the war was lost because he was not there, that he was not doing his part. Because he understood however big wars and armies are it also comes down to what each man does. And could he let that evil flourish and walk the earth? So he signed up and stuck it to the end.”

  After a long moment, a thoughtful and respectful one, August said, “My Lord. That’s some kind of a man. To order things such a way. I see why you stuck by him.”

  Harlan turned then and August saw a faint quick grin in the dark. The boy said, “I guess. But what he also told me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That he struggled all through that war, doing his best and never sure how it would come out, though he knew how it must and knew none of them would quit until it did. And then it did. And he said, ‘So I rode the rails home ready for my old life again and also, small patch of pride, feeling I’d done my part and had vanquished evil.’ Even those bastards killing Lincoln, that was what he called a last desperate flourish of evil. So he come on home. And what he found.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Four long years and then some, he’d thought he’d spent to drain the evil out of this land and he come home and found evil was alive and well. Had snuck in behind him and worked at him and done its best. Which was not some great war but a smaller war as if evil had a head that could be severed but would slither fast and reconnect to whatever was closest and dearest. He told me that and I didn’t say a word but I knew he was right. Because I’d seen what he was talking about.”

  August said, “It seems you have.”

  “I’m sticking by him. Even if he says he don’t want it.”

  August stood. He stepped to the edge of the porch and peered into the dark and said, “I’m thinking he doesn’t know what he wants just now. It’s a bad place to be, where he is, what he’s done. I can’t imagine, myself. But I also think you’re right to stick by him, that he’ll need you if he knows it or not. I’d say he’s a lucky man to have taken you on. Or perhaps smart, even if he didn’t know how smart he was at the time.”

  “I’m dearly frightened for him.”

  “Of course you are. But patience, boy. Sometimes life feels endless and grinding. Other times it changes in a day.”

  “I surely seen that.”

  August said, “Those mules will truly work for you?”

  “Like magic.”

  “I guess we’ll see about that in the morning. As to Malcolm Hopeton, trust I stand behind you.”

  Harlan was quiet.

  August turned and said, “I stand with you. Is that clear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good. Now let’s get on to bed. But first, I’d have a hunk of the fresh bread we’re smelling. With butter. You?”

  The boy smiled in the dark, the stripe of lamplight down the hall and out the open door. He said, “I feel I could eat a loaf.”

  “That could make your sister testy but if you can you shall. It’s been a long day.”

  Five

  The next afternoon the wind sprang up from the west, by midnight was in the west-southwest and it was raining, a gentle, steady, soaking rain. Not all the corn had been cultivated but he’d borrowed a sulky rig from his cousin Marsh and so Harlan with his mules and August on his own rig had made considerable headway: The cultivators were light, with little drag, and once the teams found their stride the workday had been pleasant and easily long. All a man had to do was ride with the soft rasping swish of the longer leaves brushing the cultivator arms and to look about; killdeer running down the rows ahead, bobolinks and meadowlarks and butterflies in all hues lofting along, birdsong from the hedgerows floating over them, a small gathering of crows in the clump of big oaks at the edge of the stream’s ravine barked and circled and circled again. The pair of red-tails that lived in the ravine and that had followed the haying intently, watching and diving for fleeing mice and voles, drifted above, patient, too high for the crows to plague. The trace-chains jingled and tails swished against flies.

  When August felt the breeze he pulled onto the headland and instead of turning south went north to meet Harlan, who was quartering the western half of the field, and Harlan saw him coming and drew up the mules and waited. Going toward him a woodchuck, grown fat from the headland grass and the clover and timothy of the hayfield on the far side of the hedge, trundled fast toward the protection of her burrow. Some farmers shot woodchucks, others dropped poison baits into the burrows, the argument not being the damage of crops—which none but a fool could put forth—but rather that cattle or other livestock might break a leg stepping into those burrows that dotted pastures, meadows and hayfi
elds. August practiced none of these exterminations, calculating that he’d never once seen or heard of such actual damage, considering also that while woodchucks might not be under man’s dominion in the sense of livestock and husbandry, they were nevertheless beasts of the fields. He held that interpretation more broadly than others but was content with it. The exception being his house-gardens, which he fenced with high plank stockades, trenched three feet down to keep out the burrowing chucks but also rising six feet above ground to hold the deer at bay. Though there were fewer deer than when he’d been a boy.

  The teams came abreast of each other and stopped nose to nose, leaving the men a dozen feet apart. August drew slightly on his reins and his team held while Harlan chirped up the mules, which advanced, stately, their tight sorrel coats hardly showing sweat. Harlan turned his curled fists down slightly and stopped his team, looked at August, and grinned. “If it was all like this.”

  August said, “You smell that air?”

  “Rain?”

  “I’d welcome it. You get to the end of your row, trot your mules back to the house and tell your sister you and I will be at this until dark. We’ll milk after. She could carry some supper out here when it suits her and otherwise carry her bushels out to the gardens and start picking everything nigh ready; my guess is we’ll be canning tomorrow.”

  “I ain’t never canned.”

  “I’m curious what in the world you lived on winters at Hopeton’s. No. Don’t start. Get on with your message and get back. But, Harlan?”

  “What is it?”

  “You said ‘If it was all like this.’”

  Harlan had a stalk of grass tucked one corner of his mouth. With just-parted lips he used his tongue to roll it to the other corner. “We’d think it was hard work. Mr. Swartout, I damn well know hard work and the difference.”