by Daren Wang
“Father, this is Isabel Fitch,” Leander said, drawing her closer.
His father took her offered hand politely, but looked at her with hooded eyes.
“I have prime lumber ready to sell,” he said. “I just spoke with a half-dozen buyers, and they tell me they haven’t heard from you in over a week. Exactly what have you been doing?”
Nathan looked again at Isabel in her blue gown, the expanse of milk-white skin exposed on her shoulders and powdered breasts.
“I’ve got an order for some walnut this morning,” Leander said, pulling the folded bill of sale from his coat pocket and offering it to his father.
“I don’t have any walnut,” Nathan said, skeptical. “You know that.”
“It’s the only order I could manage,” Leander said. “There’s that stand of them on the other side of the creek.”
“That’s Ebenezer land,” Nathan said. “Do you expect me to poach?”
“They won’t care,” Leander said. “They are packing up and heading west.”
Nathan scanned the paper.
“Your entire life, you’ve always done what is easiest and then asked forgiveness,” Nathan said. “But no more. Take this back and void it.”
Leander’s face reddened. He wished he had something to calm his nerves and thought of the opium pipe back in Isabel’s parlor. He started to sweat in the crowded room. In his father’s stony silence, a black-suited attendant stepped to them.
“Mr. Willis, the Lincolns have changed their plans due to the weather. They are retiring soon in order to get an early start in the morning. Mr. Fillmore sends word that if you and your daughter would like to wish them well, you must come now.”
Nathan shook his head, and the messenger moved back into the crowd.
“Aren’t you going to meet them?” Leander asked.
“I spoke with them earlier,” Nathan said, looming over his son. “They will not miss me, I’m sure. Don’t try to distract me. You will not get off the hook so easily.”
“You shouldn’t sell now anyway,” Isabel chimed in. “When the war comes, the prices for lumber will triple overnight.”
“Excuse me?” Nathan asked, his eyes bulging at the woman.
“The demand for most things will skyrocket when the war comes,” she said. “You’ll be able to name your price then.”
The color rose in Nathan’s face, and Leander stepped back instinctively.
“What do you know of such things?” he asked.
“Before my husband died, I advised him often,” Isabel said coolly. “We made a great deal of money knowing what would come next.”
“I can think of no worse type of scoundrel than a war profiteer,” Nathan growled. “The war is the reason to sell these goods now. Leander will have more important duties if it comes to pass. I expect him to enlist.”
The idea came as a surprise to Leander and his stomach clenched at the thought.
“Surely you don’t expect your boy to participate in such a folly?” Isabel asked. “A man of your means, you’ll most certainly be able to buy him a proxy.”
“He most certainly will fight,” Nathan said. “There’s been a Willis in every war since Hastings. He will fight or I’ll have nothing more to do with him.”
“Only a fool would take pennies a day to fester in some useless cause,” Isabel said. “There are fortunes to be made.”
“I am used to hearing such cynicism from the idle barons of Manhattan, but not from a lady,” Nathan said. “Your husband must have truly corrupted you.”
Isabel smiled.
“Many say that it was I that corrupted him.”
Nathan’s knuckles whitened around his whiskey glass.
“I’ve heard all I care to,” he said, shoving the bill of sale back at Leander. “Cancel this order, and get to work with some real business.”
He turned and walked away, leaving the two of them standing alone.
“He thinks I’m still a child,” Leander blurted. “Who does he think he is to order me around? I will not be told what to do. I am my own man.”
The declaration made him feel better, but his hands still shook with anger.
“Where did your friend Charles go?” Isabel asked calmly. “He was just getting interesting.”
“Would it be okay if we went now?” he asked. “I need some smoke.”
TRAIN
Mary was not used to how the big house echoed with everyone gone. Katia had made the short trip to Hydesville to meet the world-famous Fox sisters. The kitchen girl was certain that she shared the spiritualist gift with the famed sisters, and hoped they would help her develop her ability to talk with the dead.
She baked a cornbread and fried some eggs and went into the cellar to eat with Joe.
“I don’t hear anyone upstairs,” he said as he settled at the table outside the tunnel.
“Father has gone downtown to see Mr. Lincoln at the presidential ball,” she said.
She enjoyed the look of joy on his face. She’d done what she could to raise his spirits in the last few weeks, but the pain he was in and his time hidden in the dark tunnel were taking its toll.
“Why didn’t you go see him yourself?” he asked.
“He will make a whistle stop here in Town Line tomorrow morning,” she said. “I’ll be there to see him then. Lord knows, someone should. The copperheads in this town are more likely to shoot at him than cheer.”
She smiled.
“After the train leaves the station, it will pass right through our field. I expect my father will get a good price on presidential rye in the fall.”
“I remember the day after the election,” Joe said. “No one left the big house at all. They didn’t send anyone to take us to the fields, stayed quiet all day, like it was a funeral. That’s how we knew who won. So in the afternoon, we all got together and we cooked us up a big meal, and danced and sang into the night. They came out onto the porch then, they just stood there with their arms folded and I kept thinking they were going to come out with their whips, or even worse. But they just watched us. They were afraid.”
He scratched at his bandaged stump.
“What I wouldn’t give to see the man that makes them so afraid.”
“I wish you could,” she said, shaking her head. “But there will be people there, probably just to jeer at him, but a few will come. And if anyone saw you, they’d drag you down South and have me in the city jail faster than you could count. It would be the end of both of us.”
His face turned grim again.
“You’re right, I know,” he said. “I know. Even here, after all these miles, things are no better, really.”
He chewed the last of his dinner silently, and the brightness that had shone at the thought of seeing Lincoln faded from his eyes.
“Can you help me back into the tunnel?” he asked, quietly.
As she brushed the dirt from her skirts where she had kneeled to help him onto his pallet, she worked through the feeling of sadness she felt. Certainly, she wished she didn’t have to say no to him, but there was something else, something harder to define.
She stopped on the stairs when she realized that she would have to spend the evening alone after she had been looking forward to spending it with him.
Mary stoked the fireplace in the parlor and sat with her book in her lap, staring into the flames for a long time. Even though the leather chairs smelled of her father’s cigars, the room always reminded her of her mother. The walls were covered in a vermilion paper that her mother had ordered from Manhattan, and every day Mary polished the little table she had used to write her letters. Katia claimed her ghost visited when the wind buffeted the tall poplars. Mary waved off the girl’s prattle of apparitions, but as the day’s flurries turned into the night’s squall, she found a comfort in the solid walls of the room that reminded her of her mother’s presence.
Storms always reminded her of lying in her little bed when she was four, quivering as limb after limb crashed to th
e ground under the weight of an ice storm’s inch-thick glaze. She let out a scream when the house shook from the fall of one of the grand elms in the front yard. Within seconds, her mother’s tired face appeared over her, softening as she gave assurances.
But tonight, drifting toward sleep, her finger wedged in the closed book, she listened to the crackle and the hiss of the fading fire and heard her mother’s voice, not soothing, but fraught with worry. She tried to make out the words, but like the dimming fire, they slipped toward nothingness.
She awoke to a sharp rap at the front door, and the book fell from her hand. The fire had died, turning the high-ceilinged room cold. She shivered as she stood and tripped in the dark.
Even as she held a match to a fresh candle, she remembered her mother saying, “Good news waits, but bad will wake you.”
The grandfather clock read a few minutes before five. The rapping came again.
She took the pistol in hand before opening the door.
Ruddy faced and shivering, Charles Webster stood at the threshold, his coat damp, his muttonchop beard flecked with ice, heavy snow haloing his formal black bowler.
“Dear God, what are you doing?” she asked. “At this hour? You are frozen half to death. Get in here.”
He looked down at the gun in her hand.
“The Willis hospitality is not what it once was,” he said. “I prefer it when your father greets me with brandy.”
She laughed.
“I was sure you were a federal agent at my doorstep,” she said, hanging the pistol back on its peg. “It’s only my father’s parsimony that stopped me from shooting you through the door. He’d have tanned my hide if he had to make a new one.”
The snow on his collar chilled her fingers as she took his coat and hat and led him to one of the chairs. He wore a new suit, and the snow-caked trousers gave off the smell of wet sheep. She brushed him off, covered him with a blanket, and rebuilt the fire from the ash-covered embers.
Mary had always liked Charles. He was a quiet man who worked whenever there was work to be done. She sometimes thought him monk-like. And though he had doted on his wife, sometimes during the months when the winter left him little to do, he would head into the wilderness for days on end. And now that Verona had died, he sometimes disappeared for weeks, coming back gaunt and unwashed, but with a peacefulness and grace in his manner that she envied.
“I don’t know if this is the hour for cordials or breakfast, but since you requested brandy…” she said, filling a glass for him. She could feel the cold radiating from him.
“What madness brings you half dead to my door at this hour?”
“I went downtown hoping to dance with you at the ball, but your father said you wouldn’t come and were planning to see Mr. Lincoln’s train at the station.” He blurted everything at once, as if he’d been rehearsing. “I didn’t want you to be disappointed, but that will be too late. They have decided to leave early, and will come through here in little more than an hour. They won’t stop at the station as planned, they’ll just pass through.”
“You rode all night to tell me this?” she asked in disbelief.
“I know seeing him is important to you,” he said. “As soon as I heard of the new arrangements, the thought that you’d miss him broke my heart.”
She shook her head, angry that he would do something so dangerous for her.
“You are a fool,” she said, pulling the corners of her mouth down. “Verona might have allowed you to spend days and nights wandering the woods, but I won’t have you killing yourself over my stubbornness. I didn’t ask for it, and I’ll not have it.”
She downed her glass all at once and glared at him, daring him to argue.
“A damned fool,” she repeated.
Like her, he had always seemed out of sorts in social settings, and she wondered how her father had convinced him to go to the ball in the first place. He sat in the chair like a scolded boy, stiff-backed with his hands on his knees and eyes downcast. She could not say if his lower lip quivered or if she had simply imagined it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, staring down at his wet boots. “I thought you would be pleased. I never knew how to make Verona happy, and now I make the same mistakes with you.”
She looked down at him and realized that she would have enjoyed being at the ball with him, and would have enjoyed seeing so many people out to celebrate the new president and that she was really just angry at herself for denying herself those pleasures. She reached out, touching the back of his hand. He looked up, open faced and vulnerable.
“Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “A stupid thing certainly, but also one of the kindest anyone has ever done for me.”
He tried to smile at her, but she could see an anxiousness in his eyes.
“I guess I should have gone downtown after all,” she said. “I have caused all this fuss, and now, at best, I can see him whizzing by at twenty-five miles an hour. It will be a pitiful showing at the station indeed.”
“Why go to the station at all?” Charles asked. “Why not greet him in your own field?”
Her face brightened at the thought.
“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” she said.
“Then it’s settled,” he said. “We should leave soon.”
“We will not,” Mary said. “You’re not going out into that cold again. You’ll catch your death.”
“I can go out in it and I will,” he said. “I didn’t ride all night to not be there with you.”
She stood and put her hand on his forehead, a mother testing a sick child for fever.
“At least go put on some of my father’s dry clothes. I’ll make us breakfast,” she said.
By the time he came down, the kitchen was warming from the stoked stove.
Even with the sleeves and trouser legs rolled, her tall father’s work clothes hung loosely on him, making him look like a little boy. When he saw her looking at him, he made a face and they burst into laughter together.
He sat at the worn kitchen table and she turned back to the cutting board. She wondered what had brought him through the heavy snow of the night to her door, and she thought that maybe, at last, he was shaking off the darkness that had enveloped him since his wife’s death. She thought of all the years she’d known Charlie Webster, and could not name a soul she trusted more.
“I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t,” she said, her back to him. “Something important to me, something that I’ve wanted to share with someone but have never been able to.”
She turned to look at him.
“You can trust me,” he said.
“I do,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself and taking a deep breath. “There’s a man hiding in the cellar, a runaway.”
He looked at her, stunned.
“He’s lost his leg,” she whispered. “He has been hiding in a horrible little hole behind my mother’s broken wardrobe for weeks, and I fear for him. He’s losing the will to live. I go down each morning, afraid that he will have found a way to end things.
“He was sick to death and wounded when he arrived,” she said, turning to look in his eyes. “His leg was so putrefied that Doc Pride had to take it off. He hasn’t been able to travel. But he’s up and around a bit now.”
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her apron, fidgeting with the detritus there.
“I want to take him to see the train,” she said. “It will still be dark when it comes through, and no one will see him if he comes with us into our own empty field. I think it may save his life.”
She watched as emotion played over his face.
“You accuse me of foolishness?” he asked. “Your father’s business, his position, this house, this farm. All in jeopardy.”
“I know,” she said.
She turned her back and put a big iron skillet on the hot stove.
“But these people, these ‘slaves’—how I hate that word—they are innocents, and they are suffering,” she said.
“He is suffering.”
“You are putting everything your father has built at risk,” he said. “You are putting us at risk.”
“Us?” she asked, turning to look at him. “You can go home, and nothing more will ever be said. I did not mean to put you in danger, too.”
She paused, looking for some sign from him.
“I know I shouldn’t involve you in this,” she said. “But I fear for him in the same way I did for you in the days after Verona’s funeral. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done to help you through then. And there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to help him now.”
He sat in silence, taking the top off the honeypot that sat on the table and lifting the dipper out, watching the honey drip back into the pot. Finally, he pushed back from the table, and her heart sank.
He said nothing, but instead of leaving, he went down the cellar stairs.
She could hear the shifting of the wardrobe, and the voices of the two men, then scuffling on the stairs as Joe, leaning heavily on Charlie, climbed, blinking, into the light of the kitchen.
Charles helped him into a chair, then sat across from him. Wordlessly, Mary put plates of food down, poured coffee, and sat next to Charles. She rubbed his arm with the palm of her hand and smiled at him.
“I had coffee once before,” Joe said. “My sister saved me some that was left over from breakfast at the big house. It was cold though, not like this. This is real good.”
“I like it with a little cream and some maple sugar,” Charles said, pushing the pitcher and bowl to him. “You might try it that way.”
When the clock chimed six, Charles got up from the table and went to the barn and hitched Timber to the sleigh. Mary gathered blankets, and gave Joe her father’s barn coat to wear. They stepped out the back door into the still-dark morning and Mary braced Joe as he hopped out and climbed into the sleigh.
“Where else will our new president be greeted by a such a party?” Mary asked. “A fugitive, a man too foolish to stay out of a snowstorm, and a twenty-three-year-old spinster.”
Charles winced as he set the draft horse off across the highway and through the blanched field. They rode across the ruts and furrows of the dormant land, the rails of the sleigh hissing as they passed through the uneven drifts. An ancient, lonely elm stood near the track, and Charles pulled up under it. They sat looking west into the blackness, and even the horse seemed hesitant to disturb the hushed dark. The clouded sky gave no light, but Charles climbed down and lit half a dozen oil lamps hanging from the tree’s branches. “Now, perhaps he’ll see us,” he said, climbing back onto his seat.
