August 1887
Charlotte Turner fidgeted on the dais as her son’s speech entered its twentieth minute. The crown of flowers on her head itched, and she longed to take it off. But the children of the community had made crowns for all the original settlers as a school project, so on it would stay, grapevines and ivy and a strand of bittersweet.
She glanced down the row at the other originals. John Wesley Wickman, upright and pugnacious, fiercer in old age than he’d ever been as a younger man, his glassy gaze reflecting an inner confusion that accounted for his fits of vehemence. Marie Mercadier, similarly afflicted with an inward absence, but from an old head injury, not the erosion of time. And Charley Pettibone, a few years younger than the rest of them, placid as a plow ox, tamed by twenty years of good meals, no longer the rambunctious lad who showed up at the colony with nothing more than a sack of borrowed clothing.
Was that all of them? Just the four? So it was. All the rest gone, lost to time, age, war. So many never came back from the war, and those who did were not the same. Her late husband, for one. So now the next generation had to carry the torch, or so Newton was saying as she refocused her attention on his speech.
Thirty years ago they came in wagons and on horseback, and on flatboats up the river. A hundred people—two score families—to break the soil and subdue the forest. And more important, to establish a new way of living, one in which the artificial divide between wealthy and poor is swept away through common ownership, common purpose, and universal suffrage. Radical ideas then, and radical ideas now. But now the mantle is ours—
Not bad, Charlotte thought, but not delivered with the verve of his father. Now there was a man who could bind a crowd. The first time she’d seen him speak, springing across a makeshift stage made of wagon beds in an open field filled with rapt listeners, her heart had pounded at his galvanism. Newton had inherited his looks, but not his charm. Just as well. James’s charm had led him into places—
No. She had made a rule long ago not to revisit the past. The past was where nostalgia and resentment lived, and she had no use for either. Yet here she was, sitting on the dais in the Temple of Community during their anniversary celebration like the figure of Nostalgia herself, a living reminder of once-upon-a-time.
As the waters of the St. Francis flow from a multitude of sources, seen and unseen—springs and brooks, freshets and fountains, so too our community grew from all over the nation and indeed the world, and continues to take on new springs of inspiration every year.
Charlotte let her gaze wander over the crowd. The second generation now, and the third. When they came out to this valley, they had no notion they would still be here thirty years later. They were idealists, or perhaps fools was the better word, swept away by the grand experiment of communal living and astonished at their good fortune in obtaining a grant of land from an adherent. So what if none of them knew anything about farming, or Missouri? A thousand acres of river bottom land would put them all in high clover. Little did they know.
Adam, her younger son, sat front and center with his wife, Penelope. That was a good match, John Wesley’s daughter and her son. Penelope’s straightforward practicality tempered Adam’s dreamy, almost mystical tendencies, and the two of them made an odd-looking but well matched team, like old man Sebastian’s mule and walking horse. They might look ungainly, but they plowed a straight furrow. Penelope’s twin sister Sarah sat beside her, not as bright as Penelope but more tenacious, and if Charlotte could wave her hand and make a wish Sarah would be her other daughter-in-law. But if wishes were fishes . . .
And what is the best way to honor that heritage? By carrying it on, not only into the next decade, but the next century.
Down the row, Marie Mercadier began to fidget, poor thing. Newton shouldn’t have included her on the dais, not with her damaged faculties, although Charlotte appreciated his impulse. Since the day years ago when Marie’s poorly chosen husband smashed her across the head with the barrel of his shotgun in a fit of anger, Marie’s mind had flickered like a poorly trimmed lamp, bright one day and thick with smoke the next. Marie spent most of her time sitting at home, on her porch on pleasant days and by the front window on bad ones, tended by her daughter Josephine. On rare occasions she would flash her old wit and willfulness, but mostly she sat wrapped in a fog of silence broken only by soft requests to Josephine for food or assistance.
Decades had passed, but Charlotte still remembered the day a couple of months after the crime, when it became clear to all in Daybreak that Marie was carrying another child inside her, a child whose condition no one could know inside her damaged body, and the thought of Marie’s battered brain trying to deal with the birth of that man’s child was too much for any of them to bear. The women of the village gathered wordlessly at Charlotte’s cabin that morning. She sent them to gather pennyroyal and primrose, which she brewed into a strong tea, saving the dregs to mash into a pungent cake to cook on the griddle. They brought the tea and herb cake to Marie in the afternoon, like a deputation from the Ladies’ Aid Society, but with somber intent.
“Here,” Charlotte said to her, and there was an instant of recognition. Marie’s look was frank and knowing. She swallowed the cake in three bites, the tea in four long grimacing gulps.
“Bitter,” Marie said. “Bitter.”
Charlotte nodded and said nothing. By the end of the next day it was over. Now she looked out over the crowd and found Josephine, sitting in a back corner as usual, but with her gaze locked on her mother from that distance as if nothing and no one were in the room. The girl never missed a stitch, that was sure. Not a girl any more, although Charlotte’s habit of thinking of her as one persisted despite her grownup figure and razor tongue, capable of skinning a goat when she took a mind. Newton carried on, oblivious to the woman in difficulty behind him.
The omens are propitious. The cattle rest in the shade, the river murmurs its approval, and the citizens of Daybreak sing as they march out to plow and harvest. Years ago, we came to this valley as strangers, with little more than willing hands and enormous dreams. Today—
Marie stood up abruptly. “I have to pee,” she announced.
In an instant, Josephine was at her side, guiding her off the platform and out a side door toward the privies, while Newton fumbled to regain his place in his notes amid a growing rumble of chuckles and low conversation. He’s losing them, she thought, and for a moment considered standing up to reclaim the audience. She’d been a fine speaker herself, in her day, and knew how to corral a rowdy crowd. But he wouldn’t appreciate that. What son would, especially one who already wrestled with the legacy of his father the founder and his mother the longtime leader? Better to let him work through it on his own, and if he didn’t, the wounds he would lick afterward would only be his self-inflicted ones.
“Citizens!” Newton cried, a little too loud. He sounded almost desperate, but his shout stopped the murmur. “Citizens, let’s honor our heritage by reciting—”
She sensed where he was going. The anthem. She glanced at Charley Pettibone, sitting next to her, and he nodded in recognition. They stood up and linked hands. Charley reached across the empty chair and took John Wesley Wickman’s hand. They waited for Newton’s cue as the hall quieted and others joined hands.
Where there is inequality, let us bring balance.
Where there is suspicion, let us bring trust.
Where there is exclusion, let us bring openness.
Where there is division, let us bring harmony.
Where there is darkness, let us bring Daybreak.
“Again,” Newton said. And this time John Wesley’s quavering voice rose above the rest. The old man may have lost most of his memory, but thirty years of weekly repetition had left their print.
It was a fine moment, redeeming all of the unconvincing, borrowed rhetoric of Newton’s speech, and even better that during the second recitation Marie and Josephine returned to the room and quietly joined hands with others in the front row. Charley Pettibone’s crown of flowers, strung over the top of his deputy sheriff’s hat, looked absurd and askew, but the simple comfort of the familiar words redeemed that absurdity as well, and all of a sudden Charlotte felt proud to be wearing her itchy crown, to be the living embodiment of Heritage or Old Times or whatever it was, her hand warm in the clasp of Charley’s wood-hard palm.
The two men who had slipped in the main door during the anthem were strangers to her. Easterners by the cut of their over-fancy suits, a handsome young man in his late twenties and a narrow-eyed older one, bald as a bullet. They stood in the back, uncertain, while the meeting broke up, then sifted through the crowd to introduce themselves to Newton. The young one was the talker. The older one, lips pressed, occasionally nodded, half listening to the conversation while his eyes darted to take in everything around them.
Newton gestured Charlotte and Charley over. “Here are a couple of our founding members,” Newton said to the men. As sudden as it had appeared, Charlotte’s feeling of well-being vanished, replaced by self-consciousness at her rustic dress and flowered crown and a vague dread despite the men’s broad smiles.
“Madam,” the young man said, bowing slightly. Charlotte extended her hand. “I am J. M. Bridges, and this is my associate Clarence Mason. We represent the American Lumber and Minerals Corporation.”
Although the older man extended his hand to shake as well, his eyes never rested, moving from face to face in the hall. Looking for easy marks and weak links, Charlotte suspected, the eyes of a dealmaker and money man. But young Bridges’ bright eyes had been fixed on a spot to her right, and without even looking Charlotte knew what had drawn his gaze—the perfect, beautiful, hard face of Josephine Mercadier.