There was a gap. Had he slept or lost consciousness? Was there a difference? Turner wasn’t sure.
He was at home now, propped up on pillows, his wound packed and tightly bound. He couldn’t remember crossing the river. But here he was, home to die.
He knew they all wanted him to heal up and go on. He could see Charlotte standing at a table in the corner, mashing boiled slippery elm bark and folding it into squares of cloth for fresh poultices. Couldn’t blame her. He didn’t want to die. But from somewhere in the middle of his body, he felt—what? Not cold exactly. Just … absent. Not there.
Dead.
That’s all they’d wanted during the war, the chance to die the way a man should, at home, surrounded by family, with a few words to share. So many men had been denied that—blown to smithereens, or trampled in a charge, or simply groaning their way to eternity in a field hospital with no one to hear their final words but a passing aide or, if they were fortunate, a comrade. So he was a lucky man.
His arm—or the place where his arm ought to be—didn’t feel dead, though. It burned and prickled fiercely. He yearned to scratch it but didn’t have the strength. Fool, to think he could scratch what wasn’t even there.
Adam was hovering nearby and Newton lingered in the doorway. He needed to talk to them. He needed words. He needed breath.
A face came out of the blur at the edge of his vision. Harley Willingham.
“I sent Charley Pettibone to see if he couldn’t find that fella before he got lost in the woods somewhere,” Willingham said. As if it mattered to Turner what happened to Flynn. “Just wondering, was that there an accident or did he mean to shoot you?”
He turned his head to the left to get Willingham out of his view and tried to wave him away. Accidental or intentional? What did it matter? Flynn had been wanting to shoot him for years, and it finally happened. Perhaps in all accidents there was some intent, and in all deliberate deeds some amount of accident. He didn’t want to think about it.
What was it that old Newton Carr used to say? The thrown stone. That was him all right. Flung up high and bright, and now falling, about to make his little splash and sink to the bottom of the pond with hardly more than a ripple.
Newton Carr. He watched Charlotte laboring over her poultices. There was a woman who had borne her share of grief. Sister, mother, father, now him.
And Adam. Adam Cabot.
Jealousy had long since burned out of him, leaving only the ache of loss. Of course Adam had loved Charlotte. Who wouldn’t? Old loves and old losses, washed downstream now like an early season flood, leaving only the driftwood lodged high in the trees as a sign of its passing.
For some reason Turner’s own father came into his mind. He could barely remember what he looked like now—just a blurry assemblage of a thick beard, intense eyes, and the smell of tobacco. The spring he had turned nine, his father had taken him overland in the wagon to Shawneetown and from there by boat to Cincinnati, three days’ travel, to hear the debate between Robert Owen and Alexander Campbell over the existence of God and the truth of the Bible. For nine days, the Welsh atheist, brought upriver from New Harmony, stood on one side of the platform and the frontier theologian on the other. A shiver of repugnance ran through the crowd every time Owen got up to speak, repugnance that turned to grudging admiration as he detailed the ills of society, ills he was personally working to remedy. Then he would offhandedly deny some deep truth of the Bible—not argue against it, just deny it, as if it were the merest of fairy tales—and the crowd would groan and cry out. Campbell would rise, his bony face solemn. He recited passages in the original language to show how they had been misunderstood over the centuries. No orator, he had to be prompted to speak up from time to time. Turner had thrilled at the two debaters, the sway of the crowd packed into the pews, the arguments flying over his head like swallows.
That was where it had all begun, he supposed. The love of oratory, the thrill of the lecture circuit, the fascination with grand ideas that he could never entirely comprehend. The ambition. The hunger for applause, which now felt so vain and ephemeral. All from a childhood trip with his father.
What would his children remember of him? What had he done that would shape their lives? He would never know. Newton, slouched against the doorframe, frowning at the floor—what was he thinking? And Adam, lingering but afraid to come too close, unable to take his eyes off the bandaged absence that was once his right arm. Would he remember anything of him besides that?
And Josephine. Where was Josephine?
“She’s here,” Charlotte said from the corner. “Right outside the room. I think she’s a little shy to come in.”
Had he been speaking aloud? He hadn’t realized. And for how long? The borders between inside and outside were getting blurry.
He wondered about Marie but was afraid to ask. But Charlotte sensed his need and walked over to the bed. “Marie’s still alive,” she murmured. “Not conscious yet, but her breathing is regular. We’ll see how she comes out.” She turned to her work but paused. “Your going over there probably stopped him from killing her, I imagine.”
Well, that was good. Better alive than dead. His feeling of relief should have been greater, it seemed to him, but somehow he could manage nothing more than a sense of mild satisfaction. Emotions were bleaching from him once again. That was how they had made it through the war, by tamping down their emotions with the idea that they weren’t losing them, but rather banking them for the future. When the war was over, they would all return to feeling again, to normality, to the simple joys and sadnesses of the life before.
The war. That’s what would shape those children, the violence and privation, not anything he had done. His meager efforts to change the world had been washed away by that great tide. He couldn’t foresee who was going to inherit the earth, but it wasn’t the meek.
“Children,” he said. Charlotte divined his meaning and pushed the boys toward him, on the left side of the bed so they wouldn’t have to come too close to his wounded side. She disappeared into the front room and brought out Josephine, holding her hand, reluctant but yielding.
That man on the hill, the hate in his eyes as he charged him with his bayonet fixed. He had to have known he was racing toward death, but hate had overpowered his need to live. They’d all done it, that rush toward the cold embrace, and it had marked them. The ordinary sensations had not been banked, but lost. His generation had become like whiskey barrels, smooth and regular on the outside, but with an interior that was charred, hollow, scoured, shiny black. It was just as well they all die off, to clear some space for the next generation. Clear the stumps so the crops could grow.
The children shuffled nervously before him, and he returned to the present moment. What was there to say to them that was worth a damn?
“I’ve been the man killing, and I’ve been the man killed,” he said, and it felt as if his breath had left him altogether. “This is better.”
His gaze wandered to the window. He couldn’t see much from this angle—a slice of sky and a blotch of tree. That was enough. When his attention came back to the room, the children had gone.
Charlotte in the corner, folding, pressing, stacking, her every movement an exercise in controlled ferocity. As if she could stave off inevitability through labor. Turner waited until he was sure he had enough breath for his words to carry across the room.
“Stop working. Come sit with me and hold my hand.”
She looked up, startled. Then her face softened and she came over, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat on the stool beside the bed that the children had just vacated and took his hand, her hair glowing in the windowlight, and Turner could see that her eyes were glistening.
They held their silence for a while.
“You’re not finished,” she said.
Turner didn’t answer. There seemed no point in arguing, and he’d been wrong before. But he felt finished. The work—the work would never be
finished. There was work enough for the centuries if they chose it. But inside, he felt a growing emptiness.
He had so much he wanted to say. Always his condition, too many words and not enough time. Her hair, floating like a vapor. The faint freckles on her cheeks. Her pale blue eyes, so penetrating and intense at times, so luminous now, soft as air. How could he ever bear to lose sight of these things? How could he tell her all this, now, so late, with so few words left?
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” she replied.
There was more to say. There was so much more to say.
He closed his eyes.