The day arrived when it was time to air out the house after a long winter and uncertain spring. Josephine started as soon as there was enough light to see that the day would be bright and clear, with enough breeze to carry dust away, but not so much to blow their possessions across the valley. She began with their mattresses, dragging them to the clothesline and throwing them over with a grunt. The bedframes and furniture came next, sitting in front of the house in a ramshackle approximation of their interior placement. Last were the rugs, rolled up and heavy with the accumulated weight of a year’s dirt, slung over the clothesline as well to await their beating.
Josephine drew bucket after bucket of water from the well to slosh through the house and sweep over the thresholds until it flowed out clear, then threw open the windows and went outside to beat the mattresses and rugs while the floor dried. She didn’t have a proper rug beater, but years ago Mr. Wickman had made her a walking stick out of a maple sapling, four feet long and finely polished, a perfect fit to her hand, and the stick served the purpose admirably.
The work was slow and laborious, but Josephine had never minded work. In her childhood, work had been a useful distraction from the terrors of life with her stepfather, her only means of staying on what passed for his good side, and she had maintained the habit in adulthood. She swept and scrubbed through lunch, not wanting to stop until the job was complete, while her mother sat in the rocker on the porch and watched the water seep out across the doorframe and through the floorboards.
After about fifty smacks with her stick on the mattresses and rugs, though, Josephine was ready to rest. She took a spot on the porch at the feet of her mother, resting her chin on the head of the walking stick as she contemplated the afternoon’s work ahead. The reverse of the morning: rugs, furniture, mattresses. She’d leave the mattresses out as long as possible to make the most of the sunshine and air. But first, more dust to be beaten out.
Of all the people to come riding by as she sat there, her hair matted with sweat and a film of dirt covering her face, the last she would have wanted was J.M. Bridges, but there he came, his seat on the horse still as awkward and uncomfortable-looking as it was when he first arrived. She’d have thought that a few months in the country would have improved his mount, but apparently not.
Bridges said nothing about her appearance, but swung down off his horse and tied its reins to the porch railing. “Let me have a turn,” he said, taking the maple stick from her and hefting it in his hand. He stepped up to the mattresses on the clothesline and shook them a little to gauge which ones still needed beating.
“Done this before?” Josephine said.
“Every spring,” said Bridges. “I was an only child, you know, so I was expected to help out both my father and my mother. She didn’t have any daughters to pitch in on these jobs.” He took a whack at the mattress. “Nice,” he said. “Our old beater was a wire thing, and you couldn’t put much punch to it.” He took another swing, harder.
Josephine let him finish the job and help her carry everything back inside, a task she wouldn’t ordinarily have allowed him to help with but for her fatigue from the morning. Marie roused herself from whatever state she had been in all day and helped carry in some of the furniture, although it was clear that her mind was somewhere else, or perhaps nowhere at all.
“I forgot to ask,” Josephine said when the job was completed. “What brings you by today? Surely you didn’t have housecleaning in mind.”
Bridges jumped up from his chair. “I almost forgot myself,” he said. “I was on my way to the mine and thought I’d bring you a book. Thought you might like it.” They walked outside, where he dug in his saddlebag and pulled out a tattered volume. “It’s somebody who traveled through here back in the old days, before Missouri was even a state.”
Josephine turned the book over in her hands. The spine cover was cracked and peeling, but the binding threads still held. “Well, thank you,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever given me a book before.”
She thought for a moment, then walked inside and took down her grandfather’s copy of Travels to Daybreak from the mantel. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “You can borrow this, but I’ll need it back. It’s not mine to give.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the book our founder wrote, back before the war. It sets out our principles. You’ll understand us better.”
“All right,” he said. “I’d like that. And your founder is—? “
“James Turner,” Josephine said. And without thinking, she added, “My father.”
She could go for years without saying those words; had gone for years without saying them; but once spoken they flowed so effortlessly, like the opening of a tap, that the whole story flowed out in quick succession. How her mother had come to the colony as a young woman. How youthful admiration had bloomed out into a dalliance, more than a dalliance really, a full-blown love affair, with herself as the outcome and breaking point. How Mr. Turner had gone off to the war, writing her letters at every opportunity, letters that she kept in a tightly wrapped bundle in her chest of drawers, and come back a broken man, lost into whatever horrors he had witnessed, while her mother married a hard-knuckled Irishman. How the whole thing had ended badly, with the Irishman beating her mother into insensibility and killing Mr. Turner, whether out of jealousy or simple criminality no one ever knew, and ended up being killed himself by one of the local vigilance committees that sprang up at war’s end.
“Then you are Mr. Turner’s—”
“Yes,” she said. “Bastard child.”
“I was going to say ‘heir,’” Bridges answered.
Josephine laughed, and her laugh brought such a look of relief onto Bridges’ face that she laughed again just to see it repeated. “No heirs around here,” she said. “We hold all our goods in common, don’t you know. It’s all in the book. Common ownership, common purpose, universal suffrage, with the goal of a community in harmony instead of competition.”
“Fine ideas,” Bridges said. “But your founder turned out to have feet of clay.”
“You can’t deny ideals just because people don’t always live up to them,” Josephine retorted. “Just as well deny Christianity because there are sinners.”
“You’ve got me there,” Bridges said. “I’ll read your book. I wonder if that’s where you came by your power at argument.”
“I came by that all on my own,” she said.
Now it was his turn to laugh. “So these Turner boys—”
“Half brothers. You’d be hard pressed to get them to admit it, though.”
“I’d bet so,” he said. He tucked the book into his saddlebag. “I’d better be going. It’ll take me another hour to get to the mine.”
“I hate to see you go,” Josephine said, surprising herself. Whatever had limbered up her tongue so? “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a conversation as much. Maybe it’s because I did most of the talking.” And without thinking further, she pulled his head down toward hers and kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t take that the wrong way.”
His face reddened. “What’s the right way to take it?”
“I wish I knew,” she said. Before she could say anything further to embolden him, or to draw herself in deeper, she darted into the house. She hated a flirt, and here she was acting like one. Bridges stayed in the front yard another moment, then climbed on his horse and rode away.
A few minutes later came a knock. Josephine felt a moment’s exhilaration—had he returned?—but something about the sound of the knock, and its timing, told her that her visitor was someone else. And indeed, she opened the door to find Newton Turner on the step.
“I saw that company man hanging around,” he blurted. “What did he want?”
“To beat my rugs,” said Josephine. “And what were you doing, spying around my house?”
“I wasn’t spying. I was walking home, like ten dozen other people might have done. And I have to tell you, nothing good will come of that man. If you can’t see it, I can. All he wants is our timber, and all his charm will go off like the fog once he gets it.”
“I thought you wanted to sell them the timber.” “I might. I only want it to be for the right reasons, for good sense and common advancement. Not because some handsome Johnny paid a call. You should know this better than anyone.”
“Should I? Why me?”
Newton’s face froze. “Never mind.”
“No, really. Why should I know better than anyone.”
“Because—” His words choked in his throat, and he seemed ready to run off the porch. “Because you are a beautiful woman, and I would imagine you’ve had plenty of men try to sweet-talk you into one thing or another.”
Josephine stepped back. “That’s what you think of me? That I am some flibbertigibbet who can be romanced into voting against the good of the community?”
“I—of course not,” he stammered. “I just thought I should do you a favor and caution you. It’s a small pond we swim in, and you’d do well not to give occasion for people to talk.”
“Thanks for the caution, Your Honor. But the only person I’ve heard do any talking is you.”
She closed the door, not abrupt but firm enough to let him know she was done with the subject. Then she sat at the kitchen table and tried to unclench her jaw. Mother had been in the front room, of course, and had heard everything. Newton had not said the words, had not needed to, but she knew full well what he meant. Would Josephine end up like Marie? Another woman who would make a foolish decision for a man. Another woman whose actions would threaten the community?
She knew the answer to that question. Josephine dipped her finger into a bucket of water near the table, left over from her labors of the morning. Fingertip dripping, she wrote on the table as if with ink.
I Will Never.
She dipped again.
Be Made a Fool Of.
She signed her name with a flourish and watched the water disappear into the grainy pine.