Morning found Turner and Smith catching the early packet boat for St. Louis. Smith still wore his preposterous derby hat perched high on his head, but had changed into a black and white checkered vest.
“If you’re looking to blend in, you might want to drop the Eastern manner,” Turner told him as the boat dropped its planks and pulled out into the current. “I am who I am,” Smith said, but his tone was nervous. “And who is that, exactly?”
“About what you’d expect. Rich family, lazy childhood, trips to Europe, bored to death. Family’s rid of me now. Had to leave Philadelphia. Caused a little scandal.”
They sat on a bench by the railing. The early birds had all rushed to the west side of the boat to get in the shade, but Turner took a spot away from the crowd. “The river twists and turns so much, you’ll be in the sun anywhere you sit,” he told Smith. Foltz had kept his promise, and with another two hundred and fifty dollars in gold coins in his possession, Turner could no longer keep the money strapped to his chest. He had it in his valise, swaddled in cloth so no passerby could hear any tell-tale clinking, and sat with one foot on either side of it.
“So has your upbringing taught you anything useful in life?” he asked Smith.
“Oh, indeed. I learned how to comport myself with an air of authority, and that if I wanted something I should just take it and not ask. And enough Latin grammar to avoid embarrassing myself.”
With the current behind them, they made St. Louis by nightfall. Turner slept on the deck with his valise for a pillow, his belt tied through its handles and then wrapped around his biceps. Smith went ashore; in the morning he returned watery-eyed and smelling of whiskey. “I like this town,” he said with a wan smile.
They caught the Pilot Knob train, and by the time they had reached Jefferson Barracks, Smith was asleep, his head bouncing against the window pillar beside their seats, a small string of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth. He woke up after they had passed Potosi and gazed out at the blur of blackjack oaks and red cedars as they sped by. There had been rumors of new mineral strikes in the area, copper, iron, maybe even silver, and they could see men with picks and shovels digging into hillsides seemingly at random.
“This is it?” he said.
“It gets wilder as we go.”
“Lovely.”
By the time they reached the Pilot Knob depot, a lonely shack set up close to the iron mines, Smith seemed mired in gloom. “Now what?” he said as they dragged their cases away from the landing.
Turner looked at the sky. It was already well past noon. “We get a room. It’s a hard day’s travel to the colony, with two fords along the way. Not something to try at night.”
They found a room at the hotel across from the courthouse in Ironton. Turner was exhausted from the trip and fell into bed as soon as it was dark, dropping his shoes at the end of the bed and using his valise as a pillow again. For a few moments he thought about how he would explain the presence of Smith. Charlotte would probably smell him out within a minute. He might have to tell her the truth despite his doubts. Surely she would see that stepping publicly into the slavery question at this moment would be poison to their place in the community—the sheriff had made it clear how even a whiff of abolition sentiment would be met. But anyone else? Was there anyone else in Daybreak he could trust with the truth?
Smith stayed up and sat in a chair, looking meditatively out the window. Turner fell asleep with him still there but at some point in the night felt him clamber into bed. When he woke, though, Smith was already gone. Turner instantly reached for his valise—found it undisturbed—and blinked in the morning sunlight. Then a piercing whistle brought him to the window. Smith was out in the street atop a wagon loaded with supplies, holding the reins on a hearty-looking team.
“All right, then,” Smith said. “Let’s go to Paradise.”
Charlotte avoided Cabot for the next several days, not because she didn’t want to see him, but because she did. She knew that if they met, she would kiss him again, and she wasn’t ready for that or for what could happen after. She wasn’t sure if she ever would be. All she knew was that she wanted to be transported back to that moment by the river when time stopped and the world seemed full of possibilities again.
In the evenings they still met, she and Cabot and Webb, and she smiled to herself at Cabot’s obvious nerves. She thought she might feel awkward around him as well, but instead she felt powerful, the possessor of a secret. It was a good feeling, though she recognized its corrosive force. As soon as the meetings were over they walked away in opposite directions, neither trusting themselves to speak. Lying in bed at night, with Newton in the crib beside her, she imagined Cabot climbing in with her, his tender hands and his clean smell. But at the same time, she missed Turner and wished he would hurry home from his tour. She didn’t know how those feelings could coexist, but they did. Two men, two powerful emotions. Two loves? She didn’t want to let the word enter her mind.
Turner’s letters said the tour was going well, with hard money to get them through the winter and, strangely enough, a paying guest to bring back to Daybreak.
“We ain’t a hotel,” George Webb sniffed when she read them the letter. “Don’t know what he’s thinking there.”
“The Oneidans do it,” Charlotte said. “The curious come out to gawk, and they charge them for the privilege.”
“We ain’t the Oneidans, thank God,” Webb retorted. But Turner’s letter had been posted from Quincy, and he was headed home. So there was no time to debate or ask for more information.
The hay was dry, so all the men turned out to put it up, with Webb supervising the stacking in the barn. There was an art to it, he insisted; the men dutifully tossed their forkfuls in the places and direction he showed them. Shortly before lunchtime, the young German carpenter, Schnack, was brought in from the fields close to the river. Unskilled with the pitchfork, he had reached down with his hands to load some hay onto the wagon and picked up a copperhead along with it.
Charlotte was still in the Temple cleaning up from lunch when they brought him in. Two men were holding him up. He seemed capable of walking, but occasionally his legs wobbled and he sank to his knees. He was groaning and mumbling, mostly in German. Sweat poured from his face and dripped off his chin. His right hand was bright red and swollen, with two clean puncture marks between the last two fingers.
Everyone looked at Charlotte.
“Put him on a table,” she said. She turned to the little Prentice girl who had been helping her clean up. “Missy, go fetch a bucket of cold water from the springhouse. And then go find Mrs. Wickman.”
She turned to the two men who had brought him in. “Take his boots off, for heaven’s sake. We have to eat off these tables.” To the clean-shaven one, she said, “I’ll need your razor.”
“Oh, Gott,” moaned Schnack. “That is my good hand.’
“I’m not going to cut off your hand, Thomas,” Charlotte said, and that calmed him. She wiped the sweat from Schnack’s brow with the cleaning rag in her hand. His teeth chattered as she lifted his hand from the table to inspect it. Newton, unknowing, played at her feet.
The puncture wounds were small and bright red. One was in the fleshy web between his fingers and the other was in the knuckle joint of the little finger. The hand reminded Charlotte of a cow’s pink udder.
The girl returned with a bucket of water, breathless with importance. Charlotte lowered the man’s hand into the bucket. The cold water felt good as she held Schnack’s swollen hand down. Hayseeds and grime floated to the top. As she rubbed off the dirt, she could see a bright red streak running up Schnack’s forearm.
The clean-shaven man arrived with his razor, and as Charlotte wiped it on her apron she signaled with her eyes for the two men to hold Schnack’s arm. She laid it on the table beside him, waited for a moment for the men to get their places, and then split the skin in a fine line across the puffy swelling of his hand, opening the vein.
Schnack howled in misery. “Oh, Gott! Cut it off, just cut it off!”
Charlotte rose from her work and looked him in the eye. He looked like a cow about to be slaughtered. “Don’t be such a baby. Didn’t you ever hit your hand with a hammer?”
“Oh yes, ma’am. This one, I run clean through with a sixteen-penny nail one time.” He raised his other hand.
“Then settle down.” Schnack clamped his lips with an embarrassed expression.
She bent down, put her lips to the wound, and began to suck. Her mouth filled with blood, which she spat onto the floor. She sucked again. Was there venom? She couldn’t taste anything. It tasted just like blood, just like the taste when she bumped her lip against a tooth. She spat, sucked, spat, sucked, spat again, pressing her thumb against the back of Schack’s wrist where a vein protruded over the bone.
George Webb arrived from the barn and examined Schnack’s arm, which was now swollen to the elbow. “How big was the snake?” he asked.
“Two foot, three foot maybe,” Schnack said. “Three foot probably.” Webb gave the other men a look. They shrugged.
“Kill it?”
“Hell, no. I just drop my hay and run,” he said. “I never seen no snakes in the city.”
“One of you boys ought to go tell the others,” Webb said. “We have a huffy copperhead out there someplace. On second thought, both of you might as well go. He’s in good hands here.”
“Mr. Webb, am I going to make a die of it?”
“I should think not. Well, I need to get back to work.” Webb turned and left.
“We’ll have you back pounding nails within a week,” one of the young men said.
“Yeah, we’ll fix a hammer to your stump,” said the other one.
Schnack cried out in frustration and pain, and Charlotte glared at the men. “Before you go back to the fields, help me get this man to his bed,” she said. They lifted him from the table, still weak-kneed, and steadied him as he walked to his house. Charlotte brought Schnack’s boots and placed them at the end of his bed. She dragged a straight-backed chair over to the bed then laid his hand on it. “Keep it lower than your heart,” she said. She wrapped the wound in a towel, loosely, so that more blood could drain out. “Do you want some water?”
“Yes, please.”
“I’ll bring you some. Thanks, boys, that’s all I need for now.”
She decided to walk to the springhouse for another bucket of the cold spring water instead of fetching it from the nearest pump; somehow the spring water was more refreshing. She stopped by the Temple, where the Prentice girl was entertaining Newton, and poured out the first bucket onto the floor, sweeping the water and blood out the door.
Mrs. Wickman had finally been located and appeared at the door. “How’s the boy?”
Charlotte shrugged. “I did the best I could. You should look in on him.”
“Land, I have never treated a snakebite. Wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Neither did I. Just went by guess.”
Mrs. Wickman swept up Newton and nuzzled him. “What a big-uns we are getting to be!” She surveyed the wet floor. “Looks like everything’s under control here.”
Charlotte’s mouth and lips felt strange. She couldn’t tell if it was venom or just her imagination, but she wanted to rinse out her mouth at the spring. “I’m going to fetch some water for Mr. Schnack,” she said. “Want to walk with me?”
“No, I need to get to my sewing,” she said. “I’ll stop by his house on my way back. I’ll take the youngun so you don’t have to carry him to the spring with you.”
They parted, and Charlotte hurried to the spring with her bucket. She knew her need was probably imaginary but felt urgent anyway. But she stopped short when she came near and found Harp Webb in the springhouse, kneeling at the spring, filling jugs.
He heard her, though, and turned quickly. “Hey,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Water should be free to all, Mr. Webb,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
He didn’t answer. “I would use the spring up closer to my house, but it’s got that sulfur taste. Don’t mind it myself, but you got to keep the customers in view.”
Charlotte watched him immerse a jug in the split wooden barrel they used to catch the water.
“Ever wonder why that is?” Harp went on. “Two springs, not fifty yards apart, and one of them is all sulfury and the other has nothing but sweet clear water?”
“No, I have to say that I haven’t.”
“I thought I told you about learning your land. Thing is, my spring comes out higher up the mountain. Runs out of different rocks and such.” He kicked at the rocks in the wall of the springhouse. “This here’s limestone of some sort. Your water gets all sweetened up by it. Mine is just a surface spring, dries up in the summer.”
“Once again, I am put to shame by your knowledge. I mean that sincerely,” Charlotte said.
“You never know when a piece of information might come in handy.” Harp finished filling his jug and then stepped away from the spring. “You go ahead, I have a bunch more to do.”
Charlotte dipped her gourd into the spring, rinsed and spit, then filled the bucket. She started to hurry away, impelled by the nervousness that Harp always evoked in her, but stopped at the door.
“Mr. Webb, do you sell your whiskey in smaller amounts?” she said.
“Sure. By the thimbleful if you want it that way. Dime a quart, two bits a gallon. Anything less than that, five cents maybe.”
“I’d say just enough for a couple of glassfuls. One of our men was bitten by a copperhead this afternoon, and I am thinking this might help him.”
Harp nodded. “Who got bit?”
“Mr. Schnack, the young German.”
“The barn-building fellow.”
“Yes.”
“Too bad. Never been bit myself, but I’ve seen ‘em bit, and it’s no fun for sure.”
“Well, thank you.”
“I’ll bring it by this evening.”
“No, just take it directly to his house. I’ll ask your father to pay you out of the community funds.”
Harp’s face was expressionless, but Charlotte knew he recognized that she didn’t want him coming by her house—especially with Turner gone. She turned to leave. Harp cleared his throat.
“Them Indians from across the river is into your sweet corn,” he said.
“Really? How do you know?”
He gave her a sideways look from under his hair. “Like I said, you can learn a lot if you watch and wait.”
Charlotte wondered with a shiver whether he had seen her out walking with Adam Cabot. Given his love of showing off knowledge, he surely would have said something, or made a hint. Still, it was an uncomfortable thought.
The next morning Charlotte was in the cornfield before daylight to test Harp’s claim. In the predawn dimness she could barely see. She tried to move quietly down the rows, but their broad leaves rustled against her arms.
When she got to the spot nearest the ford, she crouched down. The absurdity of her being out there struck her. What was she trying to prove? Did she think she could scare them away? Or even want to? Harp Webb probably laughed himself to sleep last night knowing she would be unable to resist the need to prove something to him, even though she couldn’t say what she had to prove.
Crouched in the rows of corn, she listened for unusual sounds, watched for strange sights. She steadied herself with her hands pressed to the ground on each side. Perhaps she was becoming a farm woman after all; the ground felt good under her fingers. She felt a small, sharp rock underneath her right hand and picked it up. It was not a rock at all, but an arrowhead. The men were always bringing in arrowheads or bits of pottery from their plowing or hoeing, but this was the first one she had ever found. Surely this valley had once been home to a town or village.
She looked at it closely. It was small and delicately crafted, the kind of point that might be used to hunt small game or birds, she imagined. For a moment she indulged herself in the picture of a village on this very spot. It was a perfect spot—the river close at hand, good springs, rich soil. There would have been canoes pulled onto the bank, huts and cooking fires, an industrious craftsman sitting in the shade, shaping a piece of flint, this very piece of flint, years ago. She would show this to Adam today—he would enjoy thinking about the earlier civilization that had once existed on this spot, now vanished, plowed under like so much compost.
Then a young boy came up from behind and practically ran over her back, rushing down the row with an armful of corn.
He hadn’t seen her in his haste and knocked them both off balance. Charlotte stood up in surprise and they faced each other.
He was no more than twelve and thin as a cornstalk himself. He wore a pair of baggy trousers but was shirtless and barefoot. With one hand he clutched half a dozen ears of corn to his chest; the other was outstretched as if to ward off a blow.
So Harp was right. Charlotte felt irritated at the boy, at them all. They could have just asked. But she also felt sorry for him, so thin. She wanted to show him she meant him no harm.
She held the arrowhead out to him, gesturing for him to take it. He took it from her, cautiously, as if suspicious of a trick. For an instant he examined it in the dawnlight. Then with a look of disgust he threw it in the dirt at her feet and dashed off toward the river, breaking down several cornstalks as he crashed across the field but not dropping any ears of corn.
Late in the day, Turner arrived home in a rented wagon from Arcadia, a slender young man beside him wearing a bowler and a loud vest. “We’ll put him up in Adam’s cabin,” he said cheerfully. “Two educated young men from the East, they’ll have plenty to talk about.”
His story about encountering Lysander Smith in Quincy and accepting his request to use Daybreak as a home base for botanical studies didn’t ring true to Charlotte, and in the evening he told her the full story.
“You aren’t going to ask the community?”
“How can I? Word would get around, and Daybreak itself would come under suspicion.” He paced the floor of the front room. “And please, I must ask your complete confidence as well.”
Charlotte considered. True, everyone in the area—and even some of the members of Daybreak—thought of abolitionists as dangerous fanatics. Acknowledging one in their midst, even one who promised not to do any agitating, would cause tension.
Charlotte picked up the arrowhead and put it in her apron pocket. She walked back to her house in the quiet foggy morning and sat on the doorstone. A half hour later, Adam Cabot walked by on his way to his contemplation rock.
He stopped and faced her in wordless invitation. Charlotte’s heart pounded as she fingered the arrowhead in her pocket. She could walk to him, show him what she had found, a conversation would start. She would walk with him to the river. There they would talk, they would touch. They would kiss. All she had to do was stand up and walk, walk with him down to the river, and her life would take a powerful turn. Something would happen. Something great, something terrible. Something both great and terrible. She felt herself poised on the edge of a bluff, peering over into the vastness beneath her feet. She took a deep breath.
She was not ready to take that step. She stayed where she was and waved at Cabot. He waved back, hesitantly, and walked on.
She told herself that it was the thought of Harp Webb’s prying eyes that had held her back, or concern for the sleeping Newton, but she knew it was her own lack of nerve. Perhaps someday she would gain that nerve, but not today.
“He could just stay at a hotel somewhere,” she said.
Turner held her shoulders. “One more year and we can sustain ourselves,” he said. “I truly believe that. The money this man brings will carry us through the winter and into that next year.”
“At least, let’s tell Adam. He will be thrilled to have a fellow believer.”
Turner snorted. “Him least of all. The man’s a true idealist. He’s already been tarred and feathered once, and with this man Smith as a confederate, who knows what he’d get himself into.”
Another few minutes and he had won her over. He always did. Charlotte guessed that surely Adam would suss out the true nature of Smith’s stay.
That night Turner was even more ardent than usual. At first, Charlotte did not quite feel the same level of response, but soon enough, his passion swept her away and she remembered how much she had missed him. She lay awake after they had finished, grateful for his return. Perhaps now her sense that life was out of order would go away.
It did not. Lysander Smith annoyed her at every turn. He left tips at the dining tables, which no one knew what to do with, eventually deciding to turn them over to George Webb to avoid dissension. He stayed in bed until well past breakfast, reading, and then wandered around the community getting into everyone’s business. For a while he decided that he would adopt the Grahamite diet, inspiring Cabot to join him. Within a few days he had abandoned it as boring, while Cabot stubbornly carried on with it, chewing steadily on his heavy bread and piling on ever more vegetables in his effort to purify his body and soul. Smith’s supposed botanical trips rarely lasted more than three days and tended to end with his returning hung over with tales of the nightlife of Memphis that only agitated the young men; Charlotte couldn’t imagine that he was fooling anyone outside with his story, but saw no sign that he had revealed his secret to Adam.
Schnack’s hand turned blue near to the point of blackness, and his arm swelled up to the size of his calf; but the swelling stayed below his elbow and after five days returned to something like normal. He could not bend his hand properly but could manage a saw with his thumb and two forefingers, and soon he was back at work. And for whatever reason, the corn stopped disappearing.
For about a week in the fall, Smith amused himself by guessing everyone’s weight and proved alarmingly good at it.
“A hundred forty, forty-two at the most,” he said to Charlotte one evening, walking past as she sat in her doorway snapping beans. He clapped his hands in glee at her startled glare.
“Mr. Smith, you do not amuse me.”
“That’s all right. I’m only seeking to amuse myself.”
Charlotte didn’t answer.
“You’re a woman of the East,” he went on. “We have a lot in common, you know. We should ally against these rubes, bring a little life to this place.”
“You forget I’m married to one of these rubes, Mr. Smith.”
“Now how could I forget that? Doesn’t mean you and I couldn’t enhance our cultural life, sub rosa of course.”
“You disappoint me.”
“Only because you don’t know me well yet, Mrs. Turner. I grow less and less disappointing with acquaintance.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t?” He grinned at her. “Just as well. I have no idea what I’m talking about half the time myself.”
Charlotte stood up and brushed the bean stems from her apron. “I cannot tolerate this pertness, Mr. Smith. Please go away.”
He tipped his hat and left, whistling a snatch from Traviata she vaguely recognized. Charlotte went inside with her bowl of beans, upset with Smith, upset with Turner for having brought Smith here, and upset with herself for having let Smith get on her nerves. She couldn’t stand the man’s cheek. How could he have been so forward? Was it something about her? Had a brief encounter with Adam Cabot put “loose woman” on her forehead for all to see?
She pushed these ideas away and went back to work.
Smith’s claim to culture wasn’t entirely a lie. A few days later, the sounds of a violin emerged from his house after dinner. He was playing that same aria he had hummed earlier. Listening to it as she passed by, Charlotte remembered: it was the lament the heroine—what was her name?—sings in the middle, giving up her true love at the pleadings of his father. Violetta, that was it. She stopped and rested her palm against the wall of a house. She and her father had gone to see that opera, the two of them, back in New York, when she was just a girl. She remembered this moment, how she had wanted to cry out, Don’t do it! He is your one true love! from her seat. She could see the tragic turn the story would take, how he would misunderstand, even though she thought she was doing a good thing for a good reason, giving up her happiness to save his family name. Or perhaps the tragic turn came earlier, before the story even starts, when she went astray in the first place, with all the suffering and sadness growing out of that decision.
Now she believed the tragedy came from simply being born of woman, few days and full of trouble. Here she was just twenty-four herself, and she had already suffered all the loss she thought she could stand, a sister lost, a mother lost, the pain of childbirth. The most melancholy part of it was that her troubles were no more than the ordinary, no more than others had to bear, much less than some. So this was the price of being alive. But why did it have to hurt so much? Why did the simple facts of living and dying cause so much pain? For a moment she wondered if people grew inured to the struggles of life as they aged, but then she thought of the Wickmans and reconsidered.
After the opera, they had stayed in the city, and the next morning her father had allowed her to visit Mr. Waters’ store and buy a collection of tunes from it. At home her mother had bid her to play the tune at the piano and sing it as best she could. She had complied, in the parlor twilight, though her talents were hardly up to the task, and her mother had cried at the beautiful sadness.
All of a sudden the loss seemed fresh again, almost too much to bear. And here she was out in the woods, where no one else would know the song, know where it came from, know what it meant. She looked up the dirt street to her father’s house. Was he hearing this music? And was he remembering it? Was this the place she was destined to live from now on?
This was no time to cry. This was nothing to cry about. She was not going to cry.
Lysander Smith kept his eccentricities to the outside world. Inside the cabin, he was peaceable, even restrained. Cabot learned his true mission at Daybreak in less than a day.
“And what brought you to this wretched locality?” Smith asked. “You don’t look like the De Re Rustica sort to me.”
“Driven from Kansas but didn’t want to go back East,” Cabot said. “Or at least not yet.”
“Not want to go East? What, you’re a flagellant? Or perhaps you’re a miniature Wordsworth. All this nature just annoys me.”
“But surely you understand the power of a higher call.”
Smith sniffed. “Hm. I’ll admit, the notion of fighting slavery has its draw. But like you, I am a refugee as well. I raised a cloud of dust in Philadelphia and had to be out of reach for a while.”
“Didn’t kill anyone, I hope.”
“Do I look like the killing type?” Smith asked with a laugh. “If I do, then you’re the one who needs spectacles, not that pretty little French girl who is always squinting her way around.”
“Does she? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Not your type, eh. Not mine, either. I could have guessed you would prefer a brood mare to a filly. Kansas, you say?”
“Yes, Leavenworth. I met Mrs. Turner there, and she persuaded me to join the group.”
“The lady but not the man?”
“Yes.” Cabot was increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.
“Well, then. Trés convenable” Smith laughed. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me. Besides, she’s not my type either.”
“I don’t know what you mean about a secret. And what would you say is your type?”
“Come with me to Memphis sometime, and I’ll see if I can find you a specimen.”
Cabot left him to his reading and stepped outside. Surely there was work out here that needed doing. There was always work. He walked toward the barn, thinking about Smith, of all people the least likely to be engaged in the cause of abolition. By all signs Smith was a talker and not a doer. But here he was, advancing the cause in some small way, while Cabot stood to the side. Who was the true abolitionist and who was not?
And even Smith, a complete stranger, could see that he … that he.…
That he was in love with Charlotte Turner.
He had never voiced the words to himself, even silently, but when he did so he could not deny their truth. And what was he to do about this fact? An honorable man would leave the colony immediately, manufacture some family concern, a father in failing health, a mother in need of assistance. But he knew he had no intention of doing any such thing.
Evidently he was not an honorable man.
He had kissed her, and she had kissed him back—twice—and all the careful slip-stepping since then could not erase that. He would do it again, if ever given the chance. And he would go further, he would steal her away from his friend, he would make her his. He was certain of it.
“You’re looking deep this morning.”
Turner’s voice made him leap. “Lord, you startled me.”
“Sorry. Planning your next campaign?”
“Something like it.” He paused in his walk. “Listen, I know why Smith is really here.”
Turner eyed him without speaking.
“He told me almost as soon as we shook hands.”
“I should have known he couldn’t keep a confidence. What exactly did he tell you he is here to do?”
“Scout routes for the Anti-Slavery Society, identify likely spots for a future escape effort.”
“But not to conduct slaves northward himself?”
“No.”
“Good enough. That was his promise.”
They resumed walking to the barn. “But why not?” Cabot said. “Why not use this colony as a station? We’re isolated, we could travel at night, Mississippi and Louisiana through Arkansas to here, from here a day’s travel to Illinois, a week’s more to Canada.”
Turner seized his shoulder. “Don’t speak a word of this again. If anyone needn’t be told of the danger of abolition work, it should be you. We have a great work a-building here, and I’ll not have you or anyone else endanger it with schemes such as that. Even a hint of Kansas over here would have men with torches after us in a week. You heard what Harley Willingham said.” He sighed and watched a hawk circle the ridgetop. “The real problem is how to keep this Smith from opening his mouth again. Thank God he spoke to you, and you can be trusted. But if he blabs his business in some whiskey den in town, we’ll all be lucky to get out of the county alive.”
Turner’s gaze dropped from the circling hawk to Adam’s face. “I said you can be trusted. You can, can’t you?”
“Of course,” Cabot answered. Every word they spoke now seemed fraught with extra meaning, and Cabot felt as though all his phrases began and ended with “I love your wife.”
“Then act like it. See if you can put this Smith on a leash and keep him on it.” He spun away toward the Temple of Community, leaving Cabot on the path, flushed, angry, guilty, and with nowhere in particular to go.
Lysander Smith wrote regularly to Hiram Foltz but assured Turner that he wasn’t revealing anything incriminating in his letters. “I’m not quite that great a fool, to trust the discretion of a backwoods postmaster,” he said. But when a mention of Daybreak appeared in the New York Weekly Tribune, Turner knew the source.
“Do you like it?” Smith cried, gleeful, when Turner showed him the copy of the newspaper, which Mercadier had received in the mail from a friend in St. Louis. “I knew my little tendril would find a crevice.”
Word has reached us of yet another experiment in social reform being carried out deep in the forests of Missouri. “Daybreak, “ its founders call it, and daybreak it surely represents to the souls who inhabit it. The community is founded on principles of common ownership and complete democracy, and we understand it has no particular religious bias.
We fervently hope that the principles of equality and justice represented by this community will serve as a beacon to its neighbors, residing as they do in a state where these qualities are denied to many of its inhabitants. Turner had to admit that he liked the recognition. But the glancing reference to slavery wouldn’t be helpful with the local folks. Sure enough, a month later came a piece from the New York Herald, clipped out by someone and sent anonymously in the mail.
Our friends at the Tribune report that more sprouts of one sort and another are appearing in the Western states. We remind our friend that sprouts only grow to maturity in their home soil. Many the sprout that flourished at daybreak has withered by sunset.
But there was little time to think about newspaper arguments. The wheat needed to be harvested and stored. The new reaper lived up to its claim. It clattered through the fields in a quarter of the time it would have taken the men, or less; everyone followed behind, tying up shocks of wheat and propping them together to dry.
Charlotte had seemed a little peculiar to him ever since he had returned. Turner didn’t inquire into it, thinking it might be one of those women’s moods people whispered about. Perhaps she needed to get out of the colony for a day. So when it came time for the trip into town, he arranged with Marie to watch
Newton for the day and surprised Charlotte with the idea of accompanying him the night before.
They were up before dawn, their breath hanging in the air, the wagon loaded with clothing for Grindstaff’s general store. Charlotte had their list in hand. With the harvest coming in, this was a light week. Once they had all the wheat onto the threshing floor and then into the granary, they would need to haul it to the mill, wagonload after wagonload, but for now there was food in the storehouses, and this trip was more a luxury than anything.
As he double-checked the harness on the farm wagon, Turner noticed Adam Cabot, on foot, disappearing around the bend in the road past Webb’s house.
“Now what do you suppose he is up to?” he said to Charlotte.
She cleared her throat. “I believe he has some morning religious practice.”
“He would,” Turner said, adjusting the hames.
They forded the river in the cold morning and were past the Indian camp before sunup. No smoke rose from the huts and no signs of life could be seen, but the place still had the sense of being inhabited. Charlotte sat close to Turner on the wagon’s spring seat, her body warm against his side. He shifted the reins to his left hand so they could clasp hands under the lap blanket.
Grindstaff stepped out onto the platform in front of his store as they approached. “Well, if it ain’t the outlanders,” he said, “or auslanders as them goddam Germans say from up north of town, excuse the swearing ma’am, bad habit I know, but habits once entrenched are harder to remove than a chigger. How the hell you all doing down there on the river? Excuse me, ma’am.”
“Well and good,” Turner said, stepping down from the wagon and shaking hands before helping Charlotte down.
“Listen, I got to tell you something,” said Grindstaff. “I’ll pay you for this order of clothes, but I can’t order no more this week. It may be a while before I order any more too.”
Something about the way Grindstaff looked—his leathery face and chaw of tobacco—reminded Turner of Willingham, the sheriff, and he was immediately suspicious.
“Can’t or won’t?” he said. “Maybe you just don’t like the way we live?” Charlotte laid a quieting hand on his arm.
“Hell, I don’t give a goddam how you live, excuse me ma’am,” Grindstaff said. He spit into the street and led them in the store. “You seem like good people. Hell, at least you can speak English, unlike them goddam Germans, in here all the time muttering and shit. ‘You take fifty cent? We give you fifty cent,’ buncha cheap bastards. And the Polacks or whatever the hell they are, don’t know what they eat, but damn it makes their breath stink.” He paused. “Excuse me ma’am.”
Grindstaff waved a hand at his shelves. “No sir, here’s my problem. People ain’t buying.” The pants and shirts from last week lay on the shelf in neatly folded stacks. “I sold one shirt and one pair of pants from last time. People are going for these goddam factory-mades, they’re a little cheaper but not that much, and yours are a damn sight better made, I tell ‘em hand-stitched last longer, but they don’t seem to care. Things are looking up, people got a little money in their pockets, all of a sudden they don’t want homemade stuff, they want things with a label from some goddam place back East.”
“Then why do you stock those factory-made shirts in the first place?” Turner asked.
Grindstaff looked at him as if he were a madman. “I’m a businessman, friend. I put stock on my shelves and hope to sell the damn stuff. Stock that sells, I put more of it on.”
Turner blushed. “Of course. Foolish thing for me to say.”
“Don’t let you hunt or fish on their land, either, the Dutchy sons of bitches. Time was, you didn’t have to ask, you just went hunting. Nowadays, half the time they won’t even let you if you ask. Sons of bitches. Excuse me, ma’am.”
They made their purchases, left the new clothes, and hurried out. Turner was embarrassed at their lack of success. All those women, cutting, sewing—for what? It would be hard news to break. And the lack of exchange items meant that Grindstaff’s ticket would be rising faster than ever—he would soon be wanting hard cash for his goods.
“Let’s not hurry back,” Charlotte said. “We have the day.”
They rode south down the Greenville road at a leisurely pace. Charlotte had packed a lunch, so they stopped along Twelvemile Creek and let the horse drink while they spread their food out on the wagon gate. The day had warmed enough to let them take off their coats.
“I guess it’s time for a new plan,” Turner said.
“And what is this new plan going to be?”
“I wish I knew.”
They chewed their ham in silence.
“I have an idea for the next issue of The Eagle” Charlotte said. “Should have mentioned it to you earlier.” Turner waited.
“It’s been ten years since the Seneca Falls Declaration. I’d be interested to read your musings on what kind of progress we’ve seen since then.”
Turner groaned. “I thought we agreed not to confuse the issues in people’s minds yet. Economic equality and equality of the sexes are separate matters.”
“We didn’t agree. You said ‘no’ and I acquiesced.”
He knew she was right, but that didn’t make it any easier. “I can’t endorse the thing, I hope you know that. We would lose too much support.”
“I didn’t ask for that. I just said it would be interesting to read your thoughts.”
“But if I don’t endorse it.…”
“If you don’t endorse it I’ll be intrigued to see your logic.”
There was no way out. Might as well surrender. “All right then, I’ll take that as a commission. Now let’s see if we can find a track that will take us back home.”
Sure enough, there was a wagon trail that cut toward the west less than a mile later. It ran along a creek bed for a while and then turned abruptly up a hill. It grew rougher and rockier, and for a while Turner thought he would have to admit defeat and turn around, but then they passed a lone cabin with a couple of kids scuffling in a bare space under the trees, what passed for a yard. A thin man with a peppery beard came out on the porch and watched them silently.
“This road go through?” Turner called out.
“Yeh.”
“Well, where does it come out at?”
“Any place you want, if you take it far enough, I reckon.”
Turner held back a retort. Comedians. “Where does it come out close by,
then?”
The man looked down the wagon track as if he were following it in his mind. Finally he spoke. “Take it straight, you get down to the river ford at Trace Creek. But there’s a cutoff a mile or two before that, takes you back to Cedar Bottom and up that way.”
“Okay, thanks.” Turner chucked the reins. Even the horse seemed impatient to move on. The man watched them out of sight, but the children never stopped rolling in the dirt.
The wagon trail was just as the man said. It followed the ridgelines, and when he took the right fork it came out near the Indian camp, empty as before. Turner had never noticed the trail before—it was just a couple of indentations emerging from the trees—and supposed it had probably been an Indian trail once. The sun was starting to get low in the sky when they reached the rocky outcrop that overlooked Daybreak.
Turner stopped the wagon and tied the reins to a little oak. He wanted to look at the colony for a while. They sat on a ledge at the edge of the bluff.
They couldn’t see the river crossing from where they sat—it was hidden in the woods below them—but they could see the main road all the way to the end of the valley, the Daybreak road branching off to the right, the rows of houses along both sides. There were thirty houses now, a village to be proud of, from the Temple at the north end down to Turner’s house at the south, where the Daybreak road rejoined the main one. The broad fields between Daybreak and the mountain were dotted with stacks of wheat, and closer to them, the corn shimmered deep green in the low slant of evening sunlight. People were walking to and fro, tiny, seemingly aimless in their movements although Turner knew that each one would have insisted on the significance of their movements. But from high above, they seemed in random motion, like ants on a hill.
The bottomland forest, which had filled half the valley when he had arrived, was being pushed back toward them; the fringe of dead trees that had been girdled for this winter’s cutting was visible, and beyond it the belt of stumps yet to be pulled. Another few years and they would have the entire grove cut down, maybe forty more acres for crops. At the base of the mountain beyond, where the pasture gave way to forest, he could see some of the community’s hogs rooting; George had begun tolling them closer and closer to the barn with melon rinds and ears of corn, in anticipation of butchering day later this fall.
“We’re going to have to manufacture something,” Turner said, mostly to himself.
“What?”
He pointed at the community. “How many people you think that river bottom can sustain? Just from the food grown on it.”
Charlotte nodded. “I see what you mean. Even if we clear the whole valley, we can’t support more than twenty or thirty.”
They looked down at the people.
“What about the reaper?” Charlotte asked.
“We harvest faster, but we don’t harvest more.”
Again she nodded. “So we need another source of income. The Eagle?”
“Good if it holds up. But not enough.”
“Donations?”
“Would you like to live on the goodwill of others?”
They lapsed into silence again. “So what shall we do?” she asked. “If I only knew,” Turner said.
They started the wagon down the rocky slope to the ford. Turner did not know what else to say.
“Have you asked Adam? Maybe he will have an idea,” Charlotte said at one point. Her voice sounded strained.
“After the harvest is over. I’m not eager to let anyone know my thoughts on this just yet.”
“Very well.” She seemed to be deciding whether to say something. Finally she said, “This man Smith.…”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid he’s going to cause more problems for us than he’s worth. He pesters Marie with suggestive remarks. He even made such remarks to me once.” Turner chuckled. “I guess you set him straight.”
“Of course,” Charlotte replied. “But Marie is younger, and besides, no woman should have to put up with this nonsense in the first place.”
She was right, naturally. Turner had observed Smith’s behavior but had written it off as the posturing of a silly young man determined to shock the world. Smith would have to be spoken to—not that it would do any good.
The weeks went on, the harvest was complete, and first frost came early. Turner thought that a ropemaking venture might work. They could plant part of the bottom field in hemp and set up a ropewalk between the main road and the river, where the ground was flat. All it would take was patience and labor. He spoke about his idea with Cabot and Newton Carr privately first, and they walked up and down the road, measuring the distance they could set up a good straight ropewalk. Two hundred yards easily. Cabot had another idea: if they set it up close to the riverbank, they could dig out a little raceway and run the ropejack with water power. Carr, ever the engineer, pointed out that they didn’t need to make a raceway for a paddle wheel; the small amount of power they would need to turn a ropejack could be gained simply by setting a piling directly in the river and mounting a wheel on it, with the other end of its shaft mounted on the bank. He immediately began sketching what he would need.
He sold the plan to the community at their next meeting.
“Hemp’s a nigger crop,” Grindstaff said when Turner approached him about seed. “Grows like hell in the river bottoms, so I’m told. But yeah, if you want to make rope, I’ll sell it for you. And probably get you a good price, too.”
Turner had begun planning his commentary on the Seneca Falls Declaration as soon as Charlotte had suggested it, and as cold weather took over he spent his afternoons in the print shed, composing. All summer they had kept the door to the shed wide open, trying to draw a breeze, but now it was closed, and they lit a fire in the stove to keep their hands warm and the ink soft.
His plan was to have Marie set the original declaration down the left column. By the time she finished that, he would have his comments ready for her to set in the column alongside.
He would use the simile of a flower to explain his point. Just as a flower does not spring up and bloom in a day, neither do conditions of equality in the world. First the root would have to be firmly set, the root of right relations in the economic sphere, from man to man. And as we could see by observing the world around us, not only was that root not set yet, it was still the barest of seeds, with communities like Daybreak the first tentative sprout. Once firm and healthy, the plant would produce its finest blossom—the right relations between man and woman.
He liked it. He could imagine this column forming the basis for his next lecture tour—maybe next year? Who knows. Emerson toured every winter. He had half a mind to ride up to St. Louis and hear him again, pick up a few tricks, maybe even meet the old master himself.
Turner was toying with the idea of making an allusion to the slavery question, perhaps the right relation between the races was, what, the seed? And the abolitionists were trying to rush the plant’s growth. Then he realized that the whole metaphor was the same one that had been used in the Herald’s snide little remark. It must have gotten lodged in his mind, and he had used it without thinking. That recognition irritated him, and he was about to scrap the whole column and start over, when he noticed that Marie had stopped typesetting.
At first he thought she was merely proofing her work without a proof sheet, as any good typesetter could do, reading the column backward and from right to left. Her back was to him. But then he saw her wipe a tear from her eye with one knuckle and then wipe the knuckle on her printer’s apron. Her slender shoulders hunched forward. Turner walked to the layout table.
“Marie,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
She glanced up, embarrassed, and wiped her eye again. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “It’s just—” she gestured at the Seneca Falls Declaration, now fully set and filling a whole column of type. “I’ve never read this before. It’s so—so—glorious.”
“Really? Never read it?”
“Never even heard of it,” she replied. “It was written, what, years ago?”
“Ten,” Turner said. “Eleven now, I suppose.”
“And signed by all these women—and men too. A hundred of them, it says here.”
“Yes.”
She ran her finger over the type. “I am a lucky woman,” she said. She gestured to the sheets of paper on the table beside her. “These great sentiments. My father and mother, all their lives they dream of a better world. My mother never sees more than a glimpse. But my father, he never lets this dream go away. For a time, he thought maybe someday we will live it out in France, but now it’s all empire, empire, the new Napoleon. We will never go back to France—” She stopped, and added quietly, “And we never want to, either. We are here today, working for this dream. We were meant to be in this place.” She smiled.
Marie’s eyes were set in their usual squint, but the expression did not make her unattractive; it gave her a half-smile and an expectant look, as though she was perpetually anticipating some surprising treat. Her dark hair was braided and pulled back to keep it out of her work, and she had it tied in an ornate knot. Turner could see why all the young men wanted her.
“You are a great man, you know,” she went on. “You have great ideas, strong ideas, and you do not just write them down. You make them happen. All around us, we see your ideas coming to life.”
Turner smiled back at her. “Marie, I need to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“This man Smith. Is he bothering you? I hear tales that he is behaving in all too familiar a way.”
She laughed. “Mr. Turner, surely you know I can manage a foolish man like Smith. I have managed all the Daybreak boys, and even Harp Webb has only been around one more time. Smith is the least of my troubles.”
“All right. But please know that if you ever need assistance—if—if this Smith becomes a problem—” He didn’t quite know what else to say. “Marie, you should marry,” he finally added. “You are young and attractive. You keep all the young men here in a constant state of excitement hoping to attract your favor. You could have any man in the colony.”
She half-turned away, looking at the floor. “I will not marry,” she said. “I am like you, I have strong ideas. And one of those ideas is that I will not marry just to be convenient. I will only marry a man I love and admire.”
Marie turned toward Turner and looked him in the eyes, her arms at her sides. “Surely you understand these convictions.”
“Of course.”
“And the man I would marry—” She paused but continued to look directly at him. “He cannot marry me.” The room was quiet. Turner understood and a rush of desire flooded through him. He knew it was insane, but took a step toward her. She did not step back.