The road to Ambrose Gardner’s house had nearly fallen through, and Charlotte wouldn’t have made it across the creek west of Annapolis if there hadn’t been a plank bridge strung across it. She led her horse across slowly to keep it from spooking. Even so, she wondered whether she had done right to cross it, for all the streams were running full and the return passage would be no easier. But for the first time in many years, she felt lighthearted, even gay, and determined not to let her enjoyment of the day be dampened by ordinary concerns. She had left early so as to catch Ambrose before he made it to town, for the excuse of lunch at Mrs. Bone’s only meant they had less time to spend together alone. And her plan worked, for she was halfway up the second hill before she spied him on his way down.
“By my word, my dear, you are as bright and brisk as a chickadee this morning!” Gardner exclaimed. She jumped from her saddle and trotted up to him. He took her into his arms in a swallowing embrace that turned into a long kiss.
“Well, now I want to sing,” he said.
“Go ahead,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to hear you.”
Gardner laughed. “Cross a donkey with a screech owl. That’ll approximate it.”
“Come on. We’re out in the woods. Who can hear you?”
“All right,” he said with a laugh, clearing his throat. “Let’s see. Here’s a good old song.” He threw back his head into the foggy chill.
“‘Twas on one bright March morning I bid New Orleans adieu,
“And I took the road to Jackson town my fortune to renew.
“I cursed all foreign money, no credit could I gain,
“Which filled my heart with longing for the lakes of Pontchartrain.”
He grinned. “Meadowlark of the mountain, that’s me.”
“Not half as bad as you let on.” She took his hand. “One of those campfire songs you were telling me about?”
He blushed. “You remembered.”
“And why wouldn’t I?”
“I’m just not used to people paying attention to what I say.”
“Well, get used to it. I listen and I remember.”
“All right, then. Yes, it’s one of the songs we used to sing in the evening. Funny, how so many of the songs we sang were about the South. The lakes of Pontchartrain, the yellow rose of Texas, the Swanee River, Old Virginny. None of us had ever been South, either.”
“Such sad songs, too.”
“Oh, we used to make ourselves cry with those songs. The colonel banned ‘em for a while, said they were bad for morale. We had to make do with marching songs.”
He pulled his coat closer. “But why’d you come out all this way? And why so early? We’re not due at Mrs. Bone’s for another couple of hours.”
Charlotte lifted the basket she had brought. “I thought we might skip Mrs. Bone’s today. I brought sandwiches.”
Gardner grinned. “That sounds like a fine idea! It’s a better day for an indoor visit than for a long hike, that’s for sure.”
George the dog met them in the woods a hundred feet before the cabin with his usual joyful wiggle. Charlotte had brought some cracklings wrapped in paper and tossed them to him.
“Now you’ve done it,” Gardner said. “He’s going to follow you home.”
“Dogs and men have similar tendencies, then. Slaves to their bellies.”
Gardner had banked a fire in his cookstove, so some added sticks of wood soon had the cabin warm. And soon the two of them were under the flannel sheets of his narrow bed, gripping each other with the intense abandon of long-unsatisfied desire. Charlotte knew she was supposed to feel embarrassment at herself, an old woman giving rein to the urges of nature, but discovered that she felt none. Instead she felt free for the first time in decades, pursuing her own feelings and wants without thinking of the opinions of others. Perhaps it was the seclusion of the forest cabin that emboldened her so, or perhaps it was the appeal of Ambrose Gardner himself, who matched her like a tenon to her mortise in mind, spirit, and now, she knew, body. Or perhaps it was the simple pleasure of not giving a damn for once about the high thoughts and low whispers of others, but doing what she wanted. All her life, people had looked to her to be the sensible one, the responsible one, looking out for the good of the community, and she had obliged them willingly. But now she felt the delight of the transgressor.
Afterward, they lay together in the quiet. “I was in love with a man once, a man other than my husband, I mean,” she said. Charlotte didn’t know why the words came out just then. She hadn’t thought of Adam Cabot in so long, and he had not been on her mind at the moment. “He wanted me to run off to California with him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Oh, no. We didn’t even get close to—you know. This, or anything like it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Charlotte laughed. “I was a married woman, with a child of my own! Running off is not in our dictionary. As for the other. I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right. Then he was killed in the war, and that was that.”
“Do you ever regret it?”
She pondered a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Not for the act itself. But there will always be a ‘what if.’ And I hate that.”
“At least with us, you don’t have a ‘what if,’” Gardner said, stroking her hair.
“No. With us, it’s more like a ‘What now?’”
“What now,” he said, “is we take a look in that sandwich basket.” He rolled out of bed and put on his trousers, and as he walked to the front room Charlotte pulled her dress over her head to join him.
“Dogs and men,” she said.
In the afternoon, he walked with her down his bluff trail to see the spring. The path was steep and slippery from the weeks’ rains, so they worked their way slowly, gripping saplings for steadiness as they descended.
The spring flowed out from a narrow, triangular cave opening about twenty feet from the river’s edge. The water, a deep greenish blue, gushed out through dolomite boulders into a series of small pools rich with watercress.
“It’s running high,” Gardner said. “Everything’s running high from the rain. River’s up a half a foot, spring’s twice as big as usual. In the summer I can go fifty, sixty feet back, until it gets down to a belly crawl, which I do not choose to do. I store my meat down here, wrap it tight and weigh it down underwater with some of these stones. You’d be surprised how big a rock it takes to keep a raccoon from pulling out your provisions.”
Charlotte gazed into the mouth of the cave, from which a faint moist breeze emerged as if from a living mouth, bearing the scent of roots and damp earth and something deeper, the smell of nascent creation itself, elements assembling into existence. She thought of underground channels deep beneath Gardner’s cabin, the flow of water unseen, emerging here after its slow, patient travel through rock and crevice.
“Where does it come from?” she said. “The water, I mean. There’s so much of it, and so constant.”
“I don’t know,” said Gardner. “Everywhere and nowhere, I guess. There was a man over by Van Buren a while back, lost a wagonload of salt down a sinkhole, and a week later the Round Spring was as salty as the ocean, or so they tell me. So no telling.”
“All the while that we are sitting and talking, going about our work, waking and sleeping, water is moving beneath us, finding its way out here and the springs at Daybreak and a thousand other places. It’s like the earth is alive, or maybe like we are aboard a great ship that moves and swells all the time, but is so immense that we don’t notice it. The world is a remarkable place.”
He gave her a look that was both quizzical and appreciative. “It is indeed.”
He had brought two gallon buckets with him, and they filled them with spring water to take up the hill. “Jack and Jill,” he said. “So let’s mind our steps.”
“Here’s where you need one of your patented pulley arrangements,” Charlotte said.
“I’ve thought about it. But this bluff isn’t as straight up-and-down as you might think from climbing it. To reach the spring, I’d have to swing an arm out thirty feet from the blufftop, and that would spoil my view. So I guess I’ll tote the buckets.”
At the cabin, Charlotte dipped out some of the water for tea and poured off a little into a shallow pan so they could wash their muddy feet. She had grown so accustomed to having a well right outside her back door, and not just any well but a deep well with a fine hand pump, that carrying water and rationing it out felt like an act from a different century. She rarely used the springhouse at Daybreak any more, even though its water tasted better than her well water. The seductions of convenience.
They sat on the back porch as the sun declined. “Not long until November,” Charlotte murmured. The mere words made her shiver. “I’ve gotten to where I hate the cold.”
“But you get to experience the glory of autumn,” Gardner said with an expansive wave to the valley below.
“True,” Charlotte said, pulling her coat closer. She had put on a pair of Gardner’s wool socks while her own stockings dried over the stove; they were scratchy and much too large, but she liked the sensation of inhabiting something of his. George lay at her feet, dozing, his tail in a slow wag. There was a great deal here that she could learn to like.
“So what do you do with yourself on a typical day?” she said.
“Anything I choose,” said Gardner. “Once or twice a week, I catch some fish or shoot some squirrels and dress them out. In season, I pick berries or greens. If I feel like reading, I read. Walk to town for the mail and supplies now and then. Range the woods.”
“Not very industrious.”
“Most people confuse industry with morality.”
Charlotte said nothing, since she was one of those people. She never felt right if she wasn’t working, contributing, engaged somehow in making the community function. She’d been that way all her life. But who was she to judge? Ambrose had served his country and earned his reward. If he wanted to spend his days walking the woods, so be it. But such idleness would drive her mad.
“Speaking of fish,” he said, “I cooked up some beauties last night and made extra for this evening. Would you care to share them with me?”
In the light of his kerosene lantern, they warmed the fish in a cast-iron skillet rubbed with lard. There were some fried potatoes in a stoneware dish that Gardner tossed into the skillet as well, and they stirred them in until everything was heated through.
“What shall we call this concoction?” he said.
“How about ‘bass melange’?”
“Oh, I like that. I always knew you possessed true elegance.”
They dined at the kitchen table in the dimming light, and a few minutes later found themselves in the bed again, making up for the lost years. Charlotte’s joints and muscles ached from the unaccustomed use to which she was putting them, but it was an ache she was glad to have.
As the first stars came out, Gardner murmured, “Are you sleeping here tonight?”
“Would you have me cross the creek in the dark, you crazy man?”
He chuckled. “No. Just wanted to make sure before I fetched out some blankets. I’ll make a pallet on the floor beside you. This bed’s too small for two to fit comfortably.” He paused. “I can walk you with a lantern. There will be talk when you go home tomorrow morning, and lots of it. You know how people are. It’s a steep price to pay.”
“I know. But I don’t care, not tonight. The old women can have their say tomorrow if they want.”
“All right,” he said, spreading out his bedroll. “Just don’t step on me if you have to get up in the night. I break easier than I look.”
Charlotte drifted off quickly despite the strange bed, and she had no idea what time it was when she awoke with an unaccountable sense of unease. The stars were bright through the windows of the room, and a faint shaft of light angled away from her, cast by the waning moon.
She sat up and swung her feet out, feeling tentatively for Gardner’s form. The blankets had been tossed back. He was gone.
Charlotte stood up. Surely he had stepped outside for a minute. She waited, listening for the creak of his step on the floorboards.
Her waiting went on too long, and she stood up and walked into the front room. The shadows there were deep, but the moonlight streaming from behind the house cast the ground outside into sharp relief. The air was still, and from far away came the cough-yip of a fox.
She wondered what had awakened her. Some stirring of Gardner’s? An animal noise, or perhaps the deep awareness of the gossip and condemnation that would await her when she rode home this morning?
Charlotte walked to a front window and looked out. She could see as far as the lean-to where her horse was stabled; beyond, the shadows of the forest swallowed all. Somewhere off to her right was the pine grove with its aerial abode. Maybe he had gone out there.
Then she saw movement, to her right but much closer, just off the corner of the house. She watched. It moved again.
It was the shape of a man, a very large man, and swiftly that shape crossed the yard and came to the door.
Charlotte stood in the darkness. She wanted to call out, but where was Gardner? To make a sound would alert this man that she stood inside, mere feet away. From her spot at the window, she could just make out the side of his body at the door. The latch lifted, slow and quiet.
More movement from the side of the house. Into the moonlight stepped Ambrose Gardner, carrying his rifle.
“Hey,” Gardner said, just loud enough to be heard.
The man at the door whirled. Gardner’s rifle cracked, appallingly loud in the silence of the night. And as Charlotte pressed her face to the window, the body of Lon Yancey, the man from the company, dropped to the step, and the twelve-inch Bowie knife he had boasted of clattered across the boards to the ground.