Charlotte Turner lowered the lid of her trunk, then lifted it again to make sure that the fit was snug yet didn’t crush the dried roses of her wedding bouquet, safely boxed among layers of clothing. She was ready.
She paused to listen for stirrings from her mother’s room down the hall. Nothing. Mother liked for her to bring tea in the afternoon. Or at least Charlotte thought she did. Her arrival was rarely acknowledged, and often the tea would be sitting untouched and cold when she returned an hour later. But sometimes there would be a murmur of thanks, a few words exchanged. At least her mother was eating regularly now. For the first two weeks after Caroline’s death she had taken no nourishment that anyone could detect, despite the entreaties of Charlotte and Colonel Sumner’s wife. Things were still not good with Mother; she took her meals in her room, rarely changed out of her dressing gown, and spent most days in a chair by the window, writing long entries in her diary.
Charlotte walked downstairs to the kitchen, where the tea had been steeping. She bent over the pot and inhaled the aroma. How could anyone resist this fragrance, the smell of distant rain and exotic soils? It was hard travel from the slopes of India to this woodstove in Kansas, and she was determined to appreciate that journey. She poured herself a cup and sat on the sofa to listen to the wind.
Sometimes she still found it hard to believe that they had been transferred to Leavenworth after all those years at West Point. It was true, as Father had reminded them at the dining table, that an officer today was lucky to have a posting at all, what with Congress whittling on the Army every year, and some arguing that it was time to disband it altogether. “Thank heaven for the Indians,” he said mildly as Caroline sniffled into her napkin. “Otherwise I might have to find respectable work at last, a barber or whatnot.”
West Point had been a queer but pleasant existence, growing up one of the twin daughters of Captain Carr. From the time she and Caroline were twelve, cadets were a constant presence, looking for opportunities to serve. Was it her approval they were seeking, or his? Charlotte could never quite tell. Caroline was the prettier one, more vivacious; she knew how to talk to these lads. Charlotte was more inward and self-conscious. She had a strawberry birthmark on her neck and developed the habit of holding her hand over her chin to hide it. Holding a thoughtful pose all the time made everyone assume that she was pondering deep thoughts, and eventually she developed bookish habits that met their expectations.
Then the war broke out, and the shortage of officers threw her quiet, contented father from his classroom into the line of fire in Mexico. Some of the men he commanded were the same sleepy cadets to whom he had been lecturing about the properties of earth and metal a few months before. A year later, after the treaty had been signed, everything went back to normal, but of course it was not, could never be. The ones who had gone to war were scattered, some out on the frontier, some discharged, some dead. The new classes of cadets were seething, angry that their chances for glory had come so close but missed them. And her father walked along the cliffs in the evening, gazing out toward Constitution Island, his face turned away, always away.
When the orders came to report to Leavenworth, Charlotte almost welcomed the change. Mexico had cost her father so much of his humor, his equilibrium; he had commanded a battery at Chapultepec, an experience about which he never spoke. The newspaper accounts had been filled with praise for the heroes and their deeds, but when she asked him upon his return to tell her about the battle, he looked at her with the blankness of death in his eyes and simply said, “Homo homini lupus. “Man is a wolf to man.
That had been five years ago, when she was a girl of sixteen. The years since had been strained, with her father holding everyone at a remove and her mother, never strong of spirit, retreating into her own uninhabited territory of writing in her diary and gazing out the window. She and Caroline had been left to their own devices a good deal of the time—a child’s dream, perhaps, but a loss as well. Caroline in particular turned into something of a coquette, in Charlotte’s eyes, with a father who didn’t notice and a mother who didn’t mind. A posting on the frontier, she had imagined, might do them all some good. But that was before they had actually come here, and Caroline had married her lieutenant, and everything had gone bad.
But enough mooning. Charlotte was not one to sit and bemoan her fate. The tea was getting cold; she poured a cup and took it upstairs to her mother.
Father had left early, as usual, without a word, as usual. He retreated into duty as surely as her mother retreated into herself. Every day since the news had come, his uniform seemed to get stiffer, his manners more formal. The three of them moved through the house in silence, although at least Father had the respite of leaving every day to command his men. For Charlotte, relief came only in her occasional visits to town and in her correspondence.
She wrote to Turner every morning, when her strength was good and there was at least a hope of sounding cheerful and resolute. His letters were less regular, often brief, their penmanship marred by the jostling of the train where they were written, but they came, and they were welcome. She was re-reading Mr. Emerson at his suggestion, and they exchanged opinions. There were times when she found Emerson entirely too sanguine about hman possibility, too enraptured by the Great Eternals, insufficient in his account of the suffering and loss that accompanied it all; but then she remembered that he too had suffered a great loss and took comfort in the knowledge that somehow he had managed to overcome it and see beauty in the world again. As for herself, she had not reached that fortunate place—could not even see it in the distance.
So the world was cruel, and the wind whistled. She knocked quietly and placed the tea tray on the table by the chair. She had learned by now that if Mother wanted to speak, she would do so, and no prompting would make her if she did not.
Mother was gazing out the window as usual. “So dry and bare,” she said. “And the wind.”
“Yes.” Charlotte knew what she was thinking about: the baked soil on the grave, the unbearable thought of weeds and animal tracks across the sacred, scalded plot. They knew the body felt neither heat nor cold, but there was something horrid about it nevertheless.
The news had come a year and a half ago, on a winter’s day with snow spitting from a leaden sky. Charlotte and her father had ridden out to Fort Riley immediately, but by then Caroline and the baby had already been buried in the fort’s graveyard, a crude wooden marker on the spot. The soldiers fidgeted nervously as Captain Carr stood at the foot of the grave.
“The woman done all she could,” a sergeant said. “She’s the wife of the trader. She done all she could, she said.”
Father heard it all without replying. The lieutenant, locked in his quarters wailing, would not see them, and they had not insisted.
“We’ll be back in the spring with a better marker,” he finally said, turning away. He climbed into the carriage.
Charlotte had not been ready to join him yet. As the men backed away, she stood at the grave, wanting to speak but with nothing to say, wanting to pray but with nothing to ask for. “Let this pass,” she said finally, although she wasn’t sure what “this” was—this sorrow, this disaster, this life, this deep silence between them all. Whatever it was, let it pass.
Mother did not appear to want to say anything further, so Charlotte left the tea tray and walked downstairs again.
Her father was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, home earlier than usual. “Walk with me, would you?” he said.
“Of course.”
They stepped onto the porch, where the heat of the day still lingered although the sun hung low in the sky. The air was muggy and still. Three men desultorily whitewashed one of the barracks across the parade ground, while a troop suffered through rifle drills under the gaze of their sergeant.
Her father anticipated her thoughts. “Better to have them drill in the sun and become accustomed to it than to have them surprised on patrol one day and be unready.”
“I know. It’s just hard to imagine that occasion around here.”
“These men will be off to Riley soon enough, or perhaps Utah. Then they’ll have occasion.”
They took the path around the perimeter of the fort—not as picturesque as the nightly path her father had walked at West Point, but with its own vistas: the Missouri River winding below them to the north and east, and to the south the dusty boomtown of Leavenworth. They paused on a hummock overlooking the river, an Indian burial mound, or so her father said.
“So you’re determined,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Your mother will miss you.”
“And you?”
“You know better than to tease me,” he said, his voice low. “Of course I shall.”
They watched as cookfires were lit along the riverbank, new emigrants, probably, or boatmen stopping for the night. She would miss him too. In the months since Caroline’s death, they had strived daily to relieve her mother’s melancholy, and failing that, to make life bearable for each other. Sometimes they felt as much friends as father and daughter.
“You know I disapprove. Not of him, but of this scheme. He said he would send for you when the place was ready.”
“Yes, I know. And you know my place is with my husband, in fair or foul.”
Her father shrugged. “Young people. No sense of time and the appropriate unfolding of things. And you were supposed to be the sensible one.”
“Things never unfold. One must unfold them.”
Brave talk, borrowed from James, she knew, but she was tired of being the sensible one, the cautious one, the one who kept everyone else together at the cost of her own desires. When the celebrated lecturer, author, and social thinker James Turner came to town, she had demanded that her father take her down the hill, more for diversion than interest in the man’s ideas. She’d heard of his philosophical romance, Travels to Daybreak, and sent off for a copy. It was a good story: A young man, rich and spoiled, embarks from America on a pleasure trip to the South Seas; is shipwrecked on a tiny, mysterious island; discovers the inhabitants, who welcome him into their society; and befriends the young son of a prominent family. The people of the island call it Daybreak, after their daily practice of greeting the morning sun from the island’s eastern cliffs. His new friend teaches him about the laws and principles of Daybreak, which include pure democracy, universal suffrage, and the common ownership of property. The young man falls in love with his friend’s beautiful sister, renounces his inheritance, and chooses to spend the rest of his life among the happy, simple inhabitants of the island nation.
Yes, it was a good story, but at first she couldn’t understand the furor it had caused. People back East had started “Daybreak Societies” and gathered monthly to discuss its principles. It was debated in the literary reviews and monthlies, and the Greeley paper even speculated about forming a model community somewhere within American borders. But then she went to the lecture and heard James Turner speak. Then she understood the excitement.
There was no lecture hall in Leavenworth as yet, so Turner had lined up three wagons at the bottom of a sloping meadow to make a platform, and once the crowd had assembled, he leaped upon them with an energetic spring. “Hello, fellow slaves!” he cried.
The audacity of his greeting stunned the audience. “Ain’t no slaves here but that fella,” a man shouted, pointing toward a black man collecting admission at the entrance.
“Oh, yes, there are,” Turner replied, striking a defiant pose. “There’s you, and your friend there, and myself, and—he mimed searching the crowd—well, I see nothing but slaves.”
A tall, broad man, with intense blue eyes and a flop of sandy brown hair that he brushed back from his face occasionally, Turner moved with the lightness of a cat on his makeshift platform, a sheaf of notes in one hand, popping with energy like a cedar log in a fireplace. He leaped from wagon to wagon with a zest that stopped just short of recklessness, drawing in the people at the edges of the crowd.
Charlotte could not take her eyes off him. Once he gained the audience’s attention, he began to work his way through his points. The tyranny of property, the false assumptions of superiority by the rich, the distortions of human nature brought about by want and greed. Occasionally someone would heckle or call out a question; Turner would stop, grin, tell a joke, draw the man in, make a point, move on. The lecture became a rolling conversational game, Turner in charge, but just barely. He seemed to relish the challenge of staying one step ahead of his listeners, entertaining and provoking at the same time. When he turned to his remedies—common ownership of land and resources, sharing the fruits of common labor, first in small communities, then growing ever larger—people stirred, grumbled, and finally listened.
Two hours later, as the people dispersed, Charlotte climbed the hill to the fort in the gathering twilight, oblivious to the chatter of the crowd. Is this how it feels to fall in love? she wondered. If so, it was a feeling she was glad to keep—breathless, excited, longing for the next chance to see him. His stance, poised and confident. His smile, engaging and bright, drawing everyone in. His voice, ringing over the murmur of the listeners. And his ideas! Oh, my. That was the best part of all. A truly original thinker, out here on the edge of civilization. Who could imagine it?
Her father invited Turner to the fort that evening to dine with the senior officers and their families. The two men debated in a friendly way, and she could see the pleased surprise on Turner’s face when she joined in, articulating her own views. Turner had a habit of gazing intently at the person he was talking to, even when the talk was not especially important, a habit which both unsettled and flattered her. But Charlotte liked that intensity and returned his gaze with equal power. His eyes had thin, pale lashes, and when she spoke, he looked directly into her eyes, not at her birthmark. Before long she was smiling broadly, laughing, her self-consciousness gone.
It was nearly midnight when the conversation broke up, but she was out of her room by seven the next morning, for a walk to town, yes, but also in hopes of seeing him. She took care to stroll by the Leavenworth House. And there he was, in a chair by the front window, a notebook in his lap as if to write, but nothing on the page. He escorted her on her walk, and by the time they returned they had made a plan to ride out to the Delaware village in the afternoon. Her father accompanied them in the coach, where the debate continued from the previous night. Could humanity really be reformed? In one generation? Two? A hundred?
The Delawares were courteous but indifferent to their discussion. They already had their answers.
At the lecture the next evening, the Indian village was mentioned, their attitude toward private property, and Charlotte was pleased to hear her views repeated. Again they dined together, and by the end of the visit Turner had been invited to return.
Then he was off to more towns on the frontier. Charlotte waited for his letters; he was scheduled to return by way of St. Joseph, and she had already prevailed on her father to ride up with her. His letters grew more personal during the weeks of his absence, and by the time he returned to Leavenworth she was ready for what followed. Proposal, acceptance, her father’s cautions and demurrals, her mother’s wan inquiries, a day’s tense pause, the family stepping in and out of rooms in the house with a short question and reply, then retreating for solitary thought and, finally, surrender, for, as they all knew, no one could deny Charlotte her wishes for long. Soon there was a marriage in the parlor of the family home, and she had gone from spinster to bride in three months’ time.
Her father interrupted her reminiscence. “Thinking about your young man, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “Well, I was a young nonesuch once. Bless you both.”
They stood in silence, their shadows projected onto the trees at the base of the bluff. Then another shadow appeared beside theirs, growing fast as a soldier came running up the slope from the fort. He saluted, breathless.
“Beg your pardon, sir.”
“What is it?”
“News from town. They’re fixing to hang a man in front of the hotel.”
Carr strode down toward the fort with Charlotte and the soldier trailing behind. “Get my horse and gear,” he called. “And tell McGrath to assemble his troop. We shouldn’t need more than one.” He paused mid-stride to smile at Charlotte. “No need to drill in the hot sun, eh, daughter?”