The day after the meeting felt like a funeral day, except that the funeral was for all of them, and all of them were mourners. Josephine had presided over the meeting for another two hours as they decided about the land, striving for equity among all the families of the community. By the end they had worked out a rough division, sketching out rough maps of the Daybreak property, and in the morning when she went outside she could see men and women in the fields, driving stakes to mark out the ownership lines.
None of it felt right. They had owned everything in common, made all decisions in common, for decades. None of them were accustomed to acting on their own without regard for the whole community, and even now as they walked about to claim their land, they spoke back and forth so no one felt cheated.
Josephine and Marie, as early residents, received forty acres of the best bottomland near the ford and a hundred acres of timber on the ridge as their portion. Marie showed no interest in joining the activity, so Josephine left her in her spot by the window and walked out into the fields.
Dathan had chosen the ground next to theirs, downstream, taking in the old slave cemetery that he cared for so lovingly. But this morning he was stepping off his boundaries with his hand on his chin, meditative.
“What are we going to do, Dathan?” Josephine said as she approached. “I can’t work forty acres, and Mama won’t be much help.”
Dathan smiled, and Josephine couldn’t help noticing that he was down to about four teeth. “I was thinking the same thing, honey. I’m too old to wrestle a plow. Maybe I should get me a hired hand. Ain’t that what they do out in the land of the moneychangers?” He grinned.
“I guess so. I grew up in Daybreak, so I’m no expert in finance.”
They looked around at the other community members roaming the fields, and the realization dawned on Josephine that they were all inexpert at this kind of individual thinking. They were so accustomed to thinking as a collective that the notion of acting on their own, pursuing only personal interests, had gone out of them. Maybe they had rendered themselves unfit for the rough-and-tumble world they were now entering, all aggression and conflict, like the passenger pigeons of her childhood succumbing to a crueler, infinitely rapacious species. She hadn’t noticed them disappearing until all at once they were gone.
“We can always grow enough food to keep ourselves alive, anyway,” she said. “This bottomland will grow about anything, as you well know.”
“Growing is one thing. Cultivating and harvesting is another,” Dathan said. “Cedeh and me, we’re broke down. I figured we were about to the point of living a quiet retirement, eating soup and such, and here we are starting over as dirt farmers. I’m not sure I’m up to it.”
“You could always sell your timberland. That’s what they want, you know. Break us up, and then buy the land piece by piece when someone has a pressing need or feels tempted. Nobody would fault you for it.”
He grimaced. “I ain’t that desperate yet. Who knows, maybe we’ll win our case next year and be able to put all those pieces together again.”
Josephine said nothing, but she couldn’t imagine such a scenario. Maybe Dathan was just trying to cheer her up. And as if she needed so see the embodiment of their plight, here came J.M. Bridges up the road from Daybreak, his horse at a walk and a look of misery on his face.
“Come to gloat, have you?” said Josephine. She turned away and would have spit on the ground if she knew how to spit properly.
Bridges’ expression sank further. “I didn’t know anything about this damnable business until I got the lawsuit papers. I swear it.”
“The oaths of men. Like stars on a summer’s morning. Isn’t that what they say?” She took a closer look. “Pardon my saying, but you look like death eating a cracker.”
Bridges rubbed his face. “I set out for the mine yesterday, but got too late a start. Had to spend the night in a barn.” He seemed about to say more, but stopped himself. “But I didn’t come here to trade miseries with you,” he said. “All right, I’ll swear no oaths. But I’ll tell you this plain. If there is a way to make this right, I will find it.”
“Don’t make promises. You’ll just aggravate me. There are some things in this world that can’t be made right. Don’t you know that?”
He nodded, saying nothing, and rode off to the north. Josephine felt a bite of remorse, for he had surely not come to gloat but to offer a word of kindness. But she shook it off. She looked at Dathan, who had stood quietly beside her during the conversation. “So maybe he didn’t know. If your company does something like this and you don’t know about it, that just makes you a damn fool or a poor manager.”
“I can’t speak on that,” Dathan said. “Only thing I’ve ever managed is myself, and I don’t do that very well.”
She watched Bridges as he turned off the road and into the woods, following the footpath to the mine. She couldn’t sort out all the mixture of feelings she had at that moment—regret at her harshness to Bridges, sorrow over the community’s loss, anger at the greed and stupidity of the world, and unexpectedly, a deep longing for something new, something good, in her life. She didn’t want to be the angry woman any more, the one who battled. What was it that Charlotte Turner had told her once? Never make peace. Never, never, never. But what if she wanted peace? What if it turned out that sometimes, and today more than ever, all she really wanted out of life was plain, simple, blessed peace.