Turner did not overlook Marie’s new beau, wading the river two or three evenings a week to sit in the Mercadiers’ front room. He knew he had no claim on Marie, but still it galled him. He sat in the Temple at dinner in the evening, watching her out of the corner of his eye, wondering guiltily how far the son of a bitch had gotten. Flynn never came to dinner at the Temple; only Daybreak people could do that. But as Marie sat with her father and Kathleen, he imagined her thinking of Flynn. He could almost read her thoughts. And a bitter trickle of jealousy dripped constantly on his mind.
He had given up publishing The Eagle; there seemed no sense to it any more. He had run out of ideas, and even if he had any ideas he wasn’t sure if he would want to share them. What had the world ever done for him? So he went out in the morning in silence, worked in the fields in silence, came home in the evening, ate dinner, and went to bed in silence as well. And on Thursdays, when the community met in the Temple, he attended or did not attend as the mood struck him, but never spoke or voted. He listened to Charlotte until the listening tired him, then left. It all seemed pointless.
Turner and Dathan often worked side by side, harvesting, woodchopping, tending the horses. Neither of them cared to speak, so they labored silently across the valley. They spoke only of their tools, the crop, whether they could make another round before the rain hit.
On the first day of November they found themselves in the field below the cemetery, where Wilkinson was walking in circles among the gravestones.
He called out to them. “You boys live here, don’t you?”
“We do,” Turner said.
“Come up here, then. I want to ask you something.”
Turner and Dathan looked at each other a moment, then walked up the hill. Wilkinson was gazing at the ground.
“So this is Lysander Smith’s grave,” he said.
“Yes,” Turner said.
“You’re sure of that?”
“I helped lower him down myself.”
“Hm.” Wilkinson walked to the other end of the cemetery, up one side, down the other. He seemed lost in thought. Finally he returned to the two men and looked down at the grave again. Then he stared at Turner and Dathan. “You boys seem like a trustworthy pair.”
They said nothing.
“How about it? Can I trust you? There’s work to be had here for a man who won’t tell tales.”
Dathan showed no interest in speaking, so Turner took the lead. “Why don’t you tell us what you want, and we’ll go from there.”
Wilkinson eyed him suspiciously. “All right. But if any of this gets back to the old lady, I’m calling you a bald-faced liar, just so you know. So tell me—who’s the last man buried in this place?” He took in the cemetery with a sweep of his arm.
Turner returned the suspicious gaze. “Buried a whole bunch in October sixty-one down there,” he said. “Federal troops, rebels, some of our people. And I believe I see what you’re thinking, and I don’t like it, sir.”
“Oh? Sharp fellow, are you? Mind reader? Well, maybe you know what I’m thinking, and maybe you don’t. I’ll tell you what, friend. That old lady wants a body, and she’s going to get a body.”
“She wants her son’s body.”
“You think she would tell the difference after eight years in the ground? You think she’ll even look? Hell, I couldn’t even tell a white man from a Chinaman after that amount of time, and I’m a damn professional. I am going to give that lady what she wants—a body of some sort with some skin on its face, hopefully, and a veil and some salts to cover the smell.”
“I ain’t digging no bodies,” Dathan said unexpectedly. The sound of his voice startled them both.
“What did you say, son?” Wilkinson said.
“You heard me. I ain’t digging no bodies. The body after death belongs to the Lord, and it ain’t for me or you to interfere with.”
“By God, you’ll dig if your boss here tells you to dig.”
“He ain’t my boss. Neither are you.”
Wilkinson looked incredulously at Turner. “What the hell kind of place is this?”
“Mr. Dathan here is correct,” Turner said. “He is as independently employed as you or I. We fought a war over this business, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Well, I’m damned,” Wilkinson said. “I thought Philadelphia had the most insolent niggers in the country, but they don’t hold a candle to you boys. All right, I’ll dig my own goddam graves. Sixty-one, you say?” He looked at the corner of the cemetery. “Not much better than fifty-nine.”
“You’ll dig Lysander Smith’s body and no others,” Turner said. He felt a sudden fury rise in him; he could feel his face getting hot, and his hands trembled. It was a sensation he hadn’t felt since the last time he’d gone into battle, the strange taste of iron in his mouth. Wilkinson seemed to sense it and backed away.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Didn’t come here to make trouble. Just want to make my living and go home. Didn’t mean any disrespect.” He retreated further, wiping his hands on his black frock coat.
Turner spun on his heel and walked down the hill toward the village. He felt that if he looked behind him, he might run back there and start beating the man. He thought of Adam Cabot, buried in that corner of the graveyard, and the Federal soldiers, and the others. To imagine Harp Webb ending up buried in Lysander Smith’s family tomb! The irony was so thick that he didn’t know whether to smile or curse.
“The boys in that cemetery didn’t die just so this body snatcher could come along and carry them off,” he said, not looking in Dathan’s direction. “It’s not right.” Dathan was silent.
At dinner that night, he thought about mentioning the incident to Charlotte but held his tongue. He didn’t quite know why. It was just another of the many things that he preferred to keep to himself these days.
They were eating pork again, pork as always. Turner was heartily sick of pork, boiled, fried, stewed, or baked in a pie. It was still pork. He knew they needed the eggs, and everyone had voted not to kill any chickens for a while, but still. Another month and it would be hog-killing time again, and more pork. Pork stretching out to meet the horizon.
“What?” Charlotte said. Turner raised his head, startled.
“What?” he said in return.
“You were saying something, something about hogs.”
He tried to cover his confusion. “I’m sorry, my dear, I must have been thinking aloud. I was thinking about pork, and the many ways we eat pork, and I was just thinking—thinking about a chicken, or a fine steak, how good a juicy steak would taste nowadays. Not that I don’t understand the necessity—the necessity—in the war, we dined on mule more than once—”
He stopped. He had run out of words. And in the silence, he became aware of the stares of his wife and children: Charlotte weary and guarded, Newton red-faced with anger. And Adam? Tears were streaming down his face, though he sat still with his hands in his lap.
“Papa, have you become a madman?” Adam asked in soft voice.
“Shut up!” Newton cried, but Turner put a restraining hand on his shoulder and turned to his younger son.
“Why do you ask, son?” he said as gently as he could. But his voice trembled.
“The boys say—the boys say you are. They say you’ve become a lunatic, a harmless lunatic who wanders the woods and fields all day. You lost your mind in the war, and—” He turned away.
“And you idle away the days with some old slave from who knows where, and pay no mind to your family or the common good,” Newton said, his eyes burning. “That’s what they say.”
“Boys, I don’t know what to tell you,” Turner said. He stared at his plate. “There’s justice in the things these people say, I’ll grant. But I’m no lunatic. Perhaps I lost myself a touch in the war, but I’m as sound a man as any. Just give me time, and I’ll find a purpose to it all. I have an idea! Let’s all take another lecture tour. You boys have never been farther than Fredericktown. It’ll be good for you to see the cities. We’ll raise money for Daybreak and see the world.” The sudden inspiration made perfect sense to him; he had been seeking a purpose, something to do with himself that would mean something, and here it was. He would do what he had always done best, talk. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? He lifted his eyes to see their reaction.
But Charlotte had left the table.
That night they lay in bed together, awake but not speaking. “You heard what I was thinking,” he finally said.
“Yes.” Her voice was soft in the dark.
“Well?”
She sighed. “What makes you think you can lecture? You hardly speak two words to me in a day.”
He felt the sting of truth in what she said. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “I hadn’t even thought about it before. But when I said it, I knew it was right. Charlotte, I have to find something to do, something bigger than myself. I need a big thing.”
“Will I get my old James Turner back if you do this?” Her voice was plaintive.
“I don’t know if that man is still alive,” he said into the night. “But if he is, you can have him.”
“All right, then,” she whispered. “But only with a vote,” she added hastily. “The community must approve.”
The vote was easily passed the next Thursday night; Turner wondered if many of the people in Daybreak weren’t secretly glad to see him leave. But as Turner and Charlotte wrote for halls and plotted the schedule, Newton declared he had no interest in making the trip.
“I want to stay in Daybreak,” he said. “Ain’t no need to ride around on trains.”
“Isn’t any,” his mother corrected. But he met her glare with a fierce look of his own.
Charlotte tried to command, then persuade, Newton to change his mind for a few days, but softened as it became clear that Turner wasn’t going to force the boy to travel. “We’ll go to Washington, see the Capitol,” she told him. “Won’t that be a fine thing, to see the Capitol?”
“It’ll still be there later on,” he said mulishly.
Adam, by contrast, could barely contain his excitement. He sat on Charlotte’s lap in the evenings as she studied the rail tables and wrote to lyceums, tracing their predicted course as it developed, and though he could not read, he traced his finger over the map. They settled on February as a start date, when the worst of winter would be over but it was still too early for planting: St. Louis to Chicago by way of Springfield and Bloomington, then across to Detroit and Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany to Boston, then back by way of the East Coast cities to Washington, then home on the B & O to Cincinnati, Vincennes, and wherever else they could produce a crowd by then.
Turner felt like Adam, transformed by excitement at the prospect of a new tour. But what would he have to say? He could hardly lecture on the same subjects as before, but what else did he know about? River valley farming? Hemp growing?
“Lecture on the war,” Charlotte said. “Or the foreign situation.”
“If I knew what the foreign situation was, I’d try it. And I think the only thing I want to say about the war is let’s not have another.”
“Suit yourself. But we need to have handbills printed by January. Perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?”
“Never mind.” Turner saw it in her look, though.
“Ah. The woman question.”
And there the issue hung for several weeks while Turner thought it over. To draw a crowd he would need to take a stance that put him apart from everyone else, and that meant only one thing. But could he plead the women’s case in good conscience?
As the days grew colder he retreated to the old print shed behind their house, closed since he had left for the war. He cleaned out the stovepipe, dusted the chair and desk, pulled down the grimy curtains, laid in a supply of paper and ink.
Through the window he could see everyone going about their business—the men with tools and loads of wood, the women with baskets of laundry, steaming in the winter air, to be thrown onto the line. Yes, the women in Daybreak had the franchise but were they really less subjugated than the men? Or than their voteless sisters in the country at large? Was their toil any less, or their freedom any greater? It was hard to see it.
But Charlotte was right; it was a fine lecture topic, one to bring in the crowds now that the slave had been freed and talk of the Negro franchise was in the air. Greeley himself would probably turn up when they got to New York. Turner put another stick of wood into his stove and tried to think of what to say.
By week’s end, he had little to show. On Saturday evening, restless, he got up from the table where the boys were playing dominoes and put on his coat. “I need to talk to Emile Mercadier,” he said to Charlotte and was out the door before anything could be asked.
Kathleen answered his knock. “Emile’s over sitting with Marie and the girl,” she said with a glance to the side. “He feels the need to chaperone or something, I suppose. I don’t mind, I can do my mending in peace.”
“Could you ask him—ask them—if I might come in?” Turner said. “I hate to intrude.”
“Of course.” She disappeared out the back and across the dogtrot. Within a moment Marie came out of her front door and called to him.
“Come in, come in,” she said. “Certainly you are welcome.”
Emile sat in a straight chair at the table, his fiddle in his hands, Josephine and Angus across from him playing cat’s cradle. Marie and Flynn were on the sofa. Flynn, sitting stiffly with his hands in his lap, gave him an edgy glance as he entered and pulled out another straight chair beside Emile. The old man’s hand was extended in his direction; Turner took it.
“You are kind to visit us on a cold night such as this,” Emile said.
“I need your advice,” Turner said.
Emile laughed. “Now there’s an honor,” he said. “A dotard like me, asked for advice.” He fingered the strings, playing a tune only his left hand heard.
“No one has a longer history with our cause than you, Emile. You were a citizen of Daybreak before Daybreak even existed.”
Mercadier nodded. “Fourier, Proudhon, Cabet, I have read them all. I knew Cabet, you know. I wrote this all in my letters to the man at the Evening Post. I shouldn’t be surprised to get a visit from him any day now,” he said with a satisfied smile. Marie and Flynn said nothing; Turner got the feeling that this subject was all too familiar.
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s Daybreak I want to ask you about. You’ve heard I am planning another lecture tour, I suppose.”
“Fine work if you can get it,” Flynn said.
“Mr. Turner’s lectures have brought good money to the colony several times before,” Marie replied. Flynn sniffed but kept silent.
“How can I help you, my boy?” Mercadier said. He patted Turner’s hand. “I don’t know where you should go. I’m a silly shoemaker. You know that.”
“Emile, I don’t know what to say,” Turner said softly. “I don’t know if it’s all been worth it. I don’t know if there’s any sense to what we are doing anymore. We work, we share, we hold our goods in common, but have we improved anyone’s life?”
Mercadier’s sightless eyes glittered toward Turner. “I don’t know, my boy,” he said. “What do you think?”
Turner had nothing to say. He felt empty. “Perhaps,” he said. “I’d like to think so.”
The room was silent for a moment, filled with Turner’s gloom, with only the quiet chanting of Josephine’s string game to break the stillness.
“You’re expecting something from me better than ‘perhaps’?” Mercadier said. “What is there in our lives that is guaranteed? I tell you this, I have liked my life and I do not regret it. Would my life be better as a shopkeeper back in France instead of an old socialist here in this valley? How should I know? I’ll take this life, it’s mine and I’m satisfied with it.”
Turner spoke to Marie. “I may speak on the question of the vote for women. You remember when we reprinted the Seneca Falls letter in the Eagle.”
Marie blushed and turned her head. How could either of them not remember? It was that moment—reading the great words, the declaration of women as a powerful people, deserving of all the rights that men so smugly hoarded as their own—when Marie had felt her own power and declared her own passion, and from that moment all their lives had changed.
“Vote for women?” Flynn said. “Now I’ve heard it all.”
“Women have voted on matters here in Daybreak for years,” Turner said, a little defensive even though he was not sure of the issue himself. “You don’t see us growing scales or horns as a result.”
Flynn sniffed again. “The women rule us enough as it is.”
Something in Flynn’s dismissal aroused Turner’s old debating instincts, and he began to make his case, but Flynn waved him off. “You’re the good man with words, I know that already. Heard it many times before. I ain’t going to try to argue with you. I just know what I know. Angus, time to go home.” He stood to leave.
“I need to go home, too,” Turner said, standing also. “Emile, you’ve been a help. Thank you.” He shook the old man’s hand and took his hat off its peg.
“Mr. Turner,” Marie said. “Thank you for coming by. And if you’d care to know it—” She paused. “I have liked my life, too, and do not regret it.”
Turner stammered a few words and let himself out the door. He was a few steps down the dark road when he felt a strong grip on his bicep; Flynn’s face pressed close to his.
“You stay away from her,” Flynn whispered in a voice full of hate. “I see your game.” Then he disappeared in the other direction, pulling Angus behind him as they made their way to the ford.
Turner watched the man’s shape vanish in the moonlight. Behind the curtains of Marie Mercadier’s house, shapes were moving, silhouetted by the lamps. Everything else was dark.
Yes, he would lecture, and the woman question would do just fine. He would talk. He would talk and talk.