The Hidden Light of Northern Fires
Page 32
The chill of the evening set in and she pulled her new coat tight. She veered farther west, avoiding the crowd, then moved back through the rye field north of the tracks.
She rode on, eastward toward Alden, seeing the house across the field, its windows glowing yellow. The planter’s moon rose over the fields Nathan had cleared many decades before. As it grew dark, Timber, too old for much work himself, stumbled in the black loam underfoot.
She’d hoped the house would be empty and quiet when she finally returned, but the windows still blazed candlelight yellow.
Steeling herself for the warm house and the pitying looks, she took her time brushing Timber, putting him up, and filling his oat bucket. The next stall stood empty, the sawhorses vacant now. It seemed like the first time in an eternity when there wasn’t someone she loved in that space waiting to be buried.
Finally, she set her jaw and walked up the path to the house.
Alaura met her at the back door, sat her at the kitchen table, and poured her a glass of corn whiskey.
“They killed the president,” she said.
* * *
In the week that followed, she carried the offer letter with her everywhere she went. Palmer, Malcolm, and Alaura took charge of the farm, directing the crews on where and what to plow and plant. With each passing day, Mary wondered if she was seeing the work done for the last time. She thought of distant San Francisco, a city where people came so quickly that ships had been scuttled in the harbor for lack of crews to sail them back East. She wondered if a lost woman could escape her own heart there.
But she could not sit while the men worked, and after too many idle days, she went out and got behind a mule herself. Returning to the house from a day of planting, she found her father’s lawyer sitting in the study with another man. Alaura had set them there with brandies and a plate of cheese and they’d lit cigars.
Mary made a show of closing doors and opening windows to the cool vernal breeze before taking a seat across from them.
“It seems that you may have already purchased the house without my knowledge,” she said, her lips pursed.
“I apologize,” Ewell replied, putting the smoldering cigar in the ashtray. “Your father was a good friend. I shared many a cigar with him in this room, and sought to remind myself of those happy times. Mary, this is Captain Fletcher Waters.”
“Sir,” she said, extending her hand, still dirty from the fields.
His suit was of a fine cut, but his face had the lines of a man that had bought it with hard work.
“A pleasure to meet you,” he said. He took her hand, and his fingers were callused and rough. He bent over and she thought he would kiss her hand like some dandy, but instead he held it, and turned it gently. “This soil is the color of ashes. I would wager you could grow anything in it.”
She tugged her hand away from his grip. “Anything but sugar cane and cotton. Now what are we discussing today?”
“Direct, as I was led to believe,” Waters said. “Well, let’s get to it. I’d hoped to get a response to my offer for this farm.”
“I buried my father a little more than a week ago,” Mary said. “It’s planting season. Surely four years of war must have taught you a bit of patience. If not, you do not have the makings of a farmer.”
Waters smiled at the jibe.
“You are right, of course,” the captain said. “I left the cavalry in January. While I was hotfooting around Virginia and Pennsylvania, my beloved wife, a fine woman not blessed with your … ah, shall we say ‘fortitude,’ was not able to keep things running on my farm, and she sold it and moved to town. That news came closer to killing me than any damned Confederate ever did. Many nights I fell asleep to the dream of going home to till soil. I hoped to see the seed in the ground this spring and I’m afraid I’ve let my eagerness get the better of my decorum.”
“The world is tearing itself apart,” Mary said. “Decorum seems the least of our problems.”
She poured herself a glass of brandy before refilling theirs.
“I appreciate you coming out here, and your offer is fair,” she said, after a pause. “I’m not sure what my plans are.”
She swallowed the brandy in one motion and lifted the lawyer’s cigar from the ashtray and took a long deep draft. She remembered watching the paroxysm that followed Leander’s first cigar, but she would have none of it. She exhaled slowly, the smoke curving around her face. She put the cigar back in the tray, straightened herself, and said, “I will have an answer for you within a week.”
She turned her back on them, opened the door, and walked out without another word.
* * *
Mary Willis rose before dawn, and walked in the chill and still-dark morning across the rye field toward the lonely elm.
The train was scheduled to leave Batavia in the early hours, passing through a half-dozen small towns before stopping in Buffalo where the casket would be displayed. Eventually it would make its way to Springfield, where, like her own father, he would be buried next to his son.
When she made it to the tracks, she stood still, her hands buried deep in her pockets, listening for the whistle in the morning silence.
“I knew you’d be here,” a voice said in the dark, and she knew it was Charlie.
He climbed to his feet from where he’d been sitting cross-legged against the tree.
His hair, pulled into a long ponytail, had gone silver, and he was clean shaven. His face was a map of scars and tattoos, a blue wing etched over his right eye, three parallel lines on his left cheek. But the skin was vibrant and smooth, and it seemed that he had shed a year for each that weighed on her.
“You look like some kind of holy man,” she said.
He laughed.
“I’m just a farmer,” he said, looking across the planted field. “Hoping to work the earth again.”
“There’s nothing left here,” she said.
He looked east along the parallel rails.
“It’s only just morning,” he said.
“I think I’m ready to light out for distant territories. To see what there is to see,” she said. “I have an offer on the farm. A good one.”
The train’s whistle sounded even as the sun broke, its light whitening the skim of frost on the peaks of the plowed field. Mary could make out a yellow lamp hanging on the front of the engine, its downward cast lighting the sad-eyed portrait mounted there.
“There’s nothing left here,” she repeated, watching the approaching light.
“I had planned to ask you to marry me that evening downtown long ago,” he said. “At the party.”
“What?” she asked. The shock was the first thing she’d felt that wasn’t pain in as long as she could remember.
“It all seems another world now. Your father had given me his blessing, even planned a public announcement. But you never came,” he said.
“Why didn’t you just ask?” she said. “I’ve always been right here.”
“I wanted to,” he said. “I rode out here through that storm, I had hoped I could ask when we came to this spot that morning.”
She managed a smile.
“I make it hard on those around me,” she said.
He stepped a little closer.
“I knew then that you loved him,” he said, then motioned to her swelling belly. “I’d raise the child as my own.”
She wanted to reach out to him, but would not allow herself to.
“All this is yours,” he said, looking at the plowed field. “It’s sown with the blood of everyone you’ve ever loved. You’ll find nothing more wherever you go. There is a new world all around. You helped make it. You belong here.”
The train passed, shaking the ground under their feet. She watched it recede into the west, passing the Town Line station without pause, the light from its red lanterns glinting on the converging tracks.
The quiet of the morning returned.
“We all start over again, today,” he said.
She stared, clear-eyed and awake at the broad western horizon and the pink light of the sunrise striking the budding line of trees across the sowed field.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve had nearly a decade to compile the list of people that helped make this book possible. Nonetheless, someone key will be forgotten. I apologize in advance.
The volunteers, staff, sponsors, and board of the Decatur Book Festival. If Mary Willis came to life today, she would find her happiness amongst you.
Jessica Handler, Joshilyn Jackson, Natasha Trethewey, Joe Borzynski, Karen Abbott, Da Chen, Charles and Katherine Frazier all read this thing when it wasn’t very good and helped me see how it could get better. They bought me drinks, commiserated, and encouraged me when I felt hopeless. What a useless mess this thing would be without you all.
When young writers dream of landing an agent, they are dreaming they will land Marly Rusoff. They may not know her name yet, but that’s who they want.
If you spend time around authors, you hear a lot of horror stories about the publishing business, but for me, it has been the land of milk and honey. Thanks to Thomas Dunne, for saying yes. To Joan Higgins, Courtney Reed, Claire Leaden, Lisa Bonvissuto, Melissa Bullock-Campion, and the rest of the team at St. Martins. But especially, to Laurie Chittenden, for supervising the train like that long-gone ancestor of yours did for Honest Abe.
But before all of those, at my heart, is Eva. Thanks for being the sensible half.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAREN WANG is the founding executive director of the Decatur Book Festival. Before launching the festival, he had a twenty-year career in public radio, both national and local. Wang has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Paste Magazine, and Five Points magazine, among others. The Hidden Light of Northern Fires is his first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
1861
RAILROAD
MARY
LEANDER
UNDERGROUND
YATES
THE BALL
TRAIN
SWEETWATER
HARRY
FUGITIVE
BELLUM
STATION
BLUE
SECESSION
1862
LOST
HOLE
TERMINUS
GRAY
1863
MANHATTAN
SUMMER
ERIE
EXILE
GETTYSBURG
HOMEGUARD
1864
PHILO PARSONS
USCT
LADIES OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
NIAGARA
1865
WINTERTIDE
INTERREGNUM
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF NORTHERN FIRES. Copyright © 2017 by Daren Wang. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Lesley Worrell
Cover photographs: landscape © Vladimir Salmon / Shutterstock.com; fence © June J / Shutterstock.com; lamp © HomeArt / Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-12235-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-12236-0 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250122360
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First Edition: August 2017