A nearing rainstorm chased Charlotte for the last quarter mile, but even as she urged her horse to a trot for the final two hundred yards to the stable, she sensed that something was wrong. Then it came to her: the mill was silent, the endless droning of the saws and chuff of the steam engine both still. The quiet seemed eerie, although Charlotte reflected that it was merely the sound of Creation itself, the sound of every other hill and hollow in the county.
The stable was empty. Charlotte unhitched her horse and led it to a stall with feed and water. She could find a boy to brush it down later. For now she needed to find out what was going on.
She walked onto the front street as the patter of raindrops started to pick up. The company store was two buildings up the way. Perhaps knowledge could be gained there.
As soon as she opened the door, Charlotte knew she had arrived too late. Three men were laid out on the bloodstained floor, two of them groaning and twisting in pain, the other still and breathing shallowly. Another dozen men stood around them, a few trying to stanch the wounds but most just gawking and murmuring. J.M. Bridges paced the floor, wringing his hands.
“Mrs. Turner!” he cried when he saw her. “You’re a woman of medicine. Thank God you’ve come. Help us.”
Charlotte walked to the worst of the three and knelt beside him. A young man, his hands bright red, was pressing on the side of his neck.
“This here’s the sawyer,” the young man said. “He was riding the log when the blade caught the spike. Blew it into a million pieces. He was right behind it.”
She nodded. It wasn’t hard to see that a piece of the blade had pierced the neck artery. The man’s eyelids fluttered.
“What’s his name?” she said.
“Hump Corum.” To her quizzical look, he added, “Given name’s Humphrey, but we all just call him Hump.”
“I’ll stick with ‘Humphrey.’” Charlotte leaned close to the man’s ear and took his hand. “Humphrey, we’re with you. We’re all right here.” She felt a faint squeeze in return. “Are you his friend?” she asked the young man, who shook his head.
An older man stepped out of the group, pulling a younger man by the sleeve of his jacket. “We are, ma’am,” he said. “We church with Hump over at the Primitive Methodist.” The young man edged forward nervously. “Come on, he won’t bite.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte said. “I think Mr. Corum needs to hear the voices of friends.”
“Can he hear us?” the man said.
“Oh yes.” Their eyes met, and Charlotte knew she needn’t say anything else. “What shall I say to him?”
“Anything. You go to church together, sing a hymn.” She gestured to his reluctant young companion. “Here. You hold his hand while I tend to the others.”
She let him take her place and turned away to the next victim as the man cleared his throat. He sang, the younger man joining in a high harmony.
My latest sun is sinking fast,
My race is nearly run.
My strongest trials now are past,
My triumph has begun.
The hymn was slow and mournful, not the sort of song she would have chosen, but so be it. The man before her now lay on his side, with an eight-inch gash in his calf and a piece of the saw blade embedded in his back. Charlotte examined it while the man tending him looked on anxiously.
“I didn’t want to pull it out,” he said. “I was afraid.” He lifted a pair of pliers as if to show her that he had been ready.
“That’s good judgment,” Charlotte said. “Hasty effort can do more harm than good sometimes.”
“Am I going to die, ma’am?” the injured man said, trying to look over his shoulder.
“Do us all a favor and hold still. You’ll die eventually, but not from this.”
The man tried to say something more but lost his breath. In his moment of distraction, Charlotte took the pliers.
“Now when I take out this piece of steel, there’ll be some bleeding, but that’s to be expected.” She pressed the skin around the blade and felt no buildup of fluid. “Get a rag,” she said to the helper, who was more pale and shaky than the wounded one. “This will hurt, but honestly I’m more worried about your leg,” she said in a low voice. “Keep it washed out with clean water and stay off it. Otherwise you’ll walk with a limp at best, and lose the limb at worst.”
I’ve almost reached my heavenly home,
My spirit loudly sings.
The holy ones, behold they come,
I hear the noise of wings.
While she spoke, she also gained a firm grip on the blade with the pliers, and now she leaned back, laid the flat of her free hand on the man’s back, and pulled out the jagged fragment. As she suspected, it had lodged firmly into his rib. She had to grit her teeth and pull harder than she would have liked.
The man shrieked in agony, but Charlotte held him still, with the proffered rag pressed against his back. “There you go,” she whispered. She laid the twisted triangle of steel on the floor beside him. “You can keep this chunk of metal. Put it on your fireplace mantel. What a story to tell your grandchildren, eh?”
The man whimpered, but made no sudden moves. Charlotte relinquished the task of pressing the rag to the wound to the man standing nearby, and then stood to find the third victim, but he had moved to a chair where he sat, both arms wrapped in makeshift bandages torn from sheets. He waved her off weakly. “I ain’t bad,” he said. “Tend the others.”
“Company’ll dock you for them sheets you ruined,” someone said to him.
“Wouldn’t surprise me none.”
The hymn-singing stopped. Charlotte looked across the room.
The older man, Hump Corum’s churchly friend, straightened up and removed his hat. Everyone else did the same.
“It’s time for his home-going,” he said.
Silence fell over them all as they listened to the rasping of Corum’s breath, ever lighter and shallower until it hung at the edge of audibility. One minute, two minutes, more. They all stood. The breathing stopped.
Charlotte felt out of place in a roomful of men who worked together, roomed together, and now suffered together. She stepped onto the front porch to let them have their time, just as the man began to pray.
The rain came down in earnest now, steady and slow, with no wind to drive it. Charlotte stood under the awning and watched it form puddles in the packed dirt street. She would need to head home soon if she wanted to make Daybreak by nightfall, and Lord knows she didn’t want to spend the night here.
A minute later J.M. Bridges joined her on the porch. They stared out at the rain in silence. She could tell he wanted to say something, but his lower lip trembled. He waited until he had regained control of himself.
“I got that letter from the man, Gardner,” he said. “I never believed he’d do it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. At the time it made sense. Why spike your own trees? It’s like putting sand in your own flour. But now it seems . . . ” He waved his hand in the air as if words could not capture the madness of his choice.
And perhaps that was true. Charlotte thought over the many choices that had led to this moment—Ambrose Gardner’s spiking of the trees, Bridges’ disregard, the men who stole the timber, the checker who knowingly paid them. The entire network of selfishness and irresponsibility that led them here, to a dead man on the floor and a widening circle of turmoil.
“It was my blindness killed that man,” Bridges said. He turned his head away and started to cry.
Charlotte knew she was supposed to comfort him, to tell him that it was all right, that he wasn’t to blame. But words of comfort eluded her. They all bore blame in abundance. Someone else could provide comforting falsehoods.
Her hands and arms were bloody, and she held them out into the rain to rinse off. “I’ve a mind to spike our own trees when I get home, and you’d damn well better believe me if I tell you I did.”
His walleyed, tear-filled look was almost too much to contemplate. “I had nothing to do with that piece of business,” he said. “I want you to know that. They don’t trust me anymore. Especially where Daybreak is concerned.”
“Whether you knew it or not, it happened. And now I’m off to deal with the consequences. Explanations don’t interest me right now.” She turned to leave, but paused. “You need to send someone to his family,” she said. “Or go yourself.”
“I’ll go. They deserve that much.” He faced her again. “I’m sorry for throwing you into this. But good Lord, I was glad to see you. We sent for a doctor, but he’ll be half a day arriving.”
Charlotte didn’t answer. If she couldn’t give him the solace of a spurious absolution for his part in this disaster, she could at least avoid compounding his misery by not telling him that she had been on her way to warn him against this precise event, and that if she had arrived half an hour earlier—
But why think about the ifs of life? The world was as it was, so she might as well face it square.
Inside, the praying stopped. Charlotte laid her hand on the door handle.
“I need to buy a rain slicker from your store, Mr. Bridges,” she said. “But I’m caught out with no cash. I hope you can carry me till the next time we meet.”
“You’re pushing on? In this weather?”
“I have a broken community to tend to. And so do you. We’d best get to it.” “This isn’t a community,” said Bridges, and Charlotte could hear sadness in his voice as well as disgust. “It’s just a town.”
“It’s yours, regardless.”
She walked into the store, took a folded raincoat off the shelf, and tucked it under her arm. The men had arranged Hump Corum’s limbs into funereal repose and were debating whether to leave him there until the doctor arrived or take him to a quieter spot.
“Might as well relocate him,” Charlotte said to Corum’s fellow parishioners. “The doctor won’t need to see him here, and you’ll need to wash the floorboards.” She paused. “Mr. Bridges is heading out to tell the family, and he may want you to go with him.”
The older man looked away, but the younger one pushed toward her, his face contorted. “Bridges can go drown himself for all I care. I’ll not stand beside him while he peddles some sham about the company’s blamelessness.”
“Easy, son,” the older man began, but Charlotte pressed her hand against the younger one’s tear-stained cheek.
“It was just a thought,” she said. “I have no place to tell you what you should or should not do.”
She stepped outside and unfolded the raincoat. Bridges sat on the whittler’s bench beside the door, his head in his hands, oblivious. To her surprise, a dagger of sympathy struck her for the young man. He was ruined, too, although he probably hadn’t realized it yet. No trust from the men, no trust from the owners. First would come the trip to the home of the unsuspecting new widow, and then the return here, where a hundred logs or more sat stacked beside the mill, worthless. No man would be so foolish or covetous as to feed those logs into a circular saw after what happened.
Charlotte slipped the raincoat over her shoulders and headed for the stable. The storm had lightened a bit, so she decided to make some distance while the darker bank of clouds lingered on the western horizon. That was their shared fate these days, it seemed, to muddle through the present disaster while hoping to dodge the next.