This Old World

by Steve Wiegenstein

  She closed her eyes. There were voices in the hallway, drunk-sounding men. She shouldn’t have come on this tour. She should have stayed home with Adam, where she could have kept an eye on Newton instead of handing him off to Frances Wickman, who was surely not up to the task. Newton had become so obstinate lately, filled with a floating anger that erupted in strange moments at the wrong people. She had never been one to take a strap to a child, but by heavens she had been sorely tempted lately. At eight he should be past tantrums and settled into his work and studies.

  And if she had taken Mrs. Smith up on her offer? She could see it all too well—the pampered child in his knee breeches, his whimsies indulged and his storms feared. If Newton was going to be a mess, at least he would be her mess and not someone else’s.

  The voices moved on. No robbers tonight, she guessed, although on second thought the robbers wouldn’t announce their coming so loudly. She kept a chair wedged under their doorknob in every hotel, a move to which James and Adam gave silent assent.

  Adam wormed himself closer against her, his nose pressed into her side. Now there was a surprising boy. Every night he sat on her lap offstage at his father’s lectures, rapt, never moving, his eyes never leaving Turner, though surely he only understood every fifth word. It was as good an education as any, she supposed, and at least he was seeing his father in a new light. He seemed bright enough, bright as Newton, but he had a dreaminess about him, always losing himself in snatches of songs or odd phrases he picked up from Dathan or Charley.

  Or Flynn. Once she awoke in the morning and started to think about her troubles, there seemed to be no end to them. He would pay back the loan for his land, she had no doubt, but she didn’t like him around, cussing everything he saw. And now that he was marrying Marie—well, good luck to them both. It could only be good for Angus to have her around, but the good for her was harder to see. Perhaps Marie felt the blush of infamy more than Charlotte had realized. Angus was such a fearful little sprat, all duck and hide, his eyes always downward. Josephine was a silent one, too, but her silence was watchful, keeping track, passing judgment. In her unkinder moments Charlotte might call it scheming. Very well, she didn’t like Josephine, go ahead and say it. Nobody said all little children were meant to be loved.

  So. Toledo, and Cleveland, and then where? Buffalo? No, there was somewhere between. Erie. The trip was hardly begun, and she was already tired. And whose bright idea had it been to loop them up around the Great Lakes in February? Hers, she supposed.

  She felt a heaviness surround her, fog drifting around her thoughts. She didn’t want to sleep. There was too much to think about, too much to plan. But the fog kept drifting, and in the cloud of iridescent shapes that filled her eyelids, she lost herself.

  * * * *

  She awoke at first light, found the chamber pot, slid it back under the bed; but by this time the boys were up, and she stepped out into the hall to give them some time. The hall was dark and smelled of tobacco smoke and sweat.

  They ate in the restaurant downstairs. Charlotte was grateful for every rush of frigid air that came in when someone entered; the stale indoor air was almost too much to bear. Afterwards they went to find the newspaper offices; Turner had wanted to spend the day talking up the editors.

  “And us, Mother?” Adam asked. “What shall we do?”

  “We will stay nearby while your father goes in and talks. Perhaps this city has a library.”

  But the streets were snowy, and no library could be found; they returned to the hotel, where Charlotte read and Adam played games on the floor.

  The lecture that night was better attended, but it soon became clear that half the crowd had paid their money for the privilege of jeering. They were a rough-looking crew, greasy-haired and loud, and they spoke in an indeterminate mix of accents. Turner could hardly finish a sentence before someone would interrupt. He tried to stay ahead with wit, but Charlotte could tell he was laboring.

  “You would have us give up the vote?” a man shouted from the back. “Give up what separates us from the mob?”

  “I ask no one to give up a blessing,” Turner called back. “The vote is a blessing, and blessings were made to be shared.” He paused a beat. “As for separating you from the mob, I’d never take a man from his friends.”

  The roar of laughter put the crowd back into his hands. But after another minute, the man was on his feet again, his arms waving, the tendons in his neck as taut as banjo strings. “We fought a war!” he shouted. “We fought a war! And now you tell us we should change our way of life.”

  “I don’t remember it being a war over keeping our privileges,” Turner replied. But his voice was soft and weary; Charlotte could tell he had no stomach for a shouting match.

  “First they want to give the vote to the niggers, and now the women!” the man shouted. “What kind of country are you trying to make? This ain’t the country our grandfathers created.”

  “Your grandfather was sleeping in the woods so the Grand Duke’s men wouldn’t find him,” someone said, and the crack brought a brief laugh. But the man would not be deterred. He marched down the center aisle shaking his fist.

  “I fought!” he shouted. “I fought in this war, by God! I fought!”

  There was a wooden chair behind the lectern. Turner sat down in it, heavily. “I fought, too,” he said.

  “I just bet!” the man said. “I know your type. Armchair generals. Big talkers. Idealists. Get down in the mud with me for a day, and we’ll see how easy you want to give up your privileges, Mr. High and Mighty.”

  The stage was small; it only took Charlotte eight steps to reach the center. She planted her feet at the edge of the stage, her hands on her hips, and bent down to face the man.

  “Well here I am!” she cried. “Take a good look at me! I’m your enemy.”

  The crowd grew quiet.

  “Not too scary now, am I?” she went on. “You’ve seen us before. I’m a daughter, I’m a wife, I’m a mother, and yes, I am a citizen. I’ve got a brain and an idea of how this country should run. Some pretty good ideas, if you ask me. But you’d never ask me, would you? Because I’m the weaker sex.”

  “Ma’am, you should get off the stage,” the man said, his tone abashed. “It ain’t proper.”

  “I know that,” Charlotte said. “But you’ll go to a theatre to watch the dancers and actresses, won’t you? It’s only when we want to express ideas that it’s not proper.”

  “A good hit!” someone called. The audience was murmuring restlessly, though. After all the years of leading Daybreak, Charlotte had nearly forgotten how strange it was to outsiders for a woman to take charge of a crowd.

  “I’m not interested in who I hit or who I miss,” she said. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the lyceum manager talking animatedly to one of the stagehands, and she knew she only had a few more moments before they would wrestle her off. “Hit or miss is not the point. The point is, we have thoughts, we have opinions, and we deserve to be heard. We can run a home and a family. Give us a chance, and we can help you run the state and the country. And make no mistake about it, we will be heard!”

  She hadn’t meant to sound so rhetorical, but she had to admit, it was a good flourish. Now how to get off? Her mind raced. Perhaps something about Turner’s service. She couldn’t let that man get away with the “armchair general” remark.

  In the instant she was considering, though, a voice called from the crowd, “Here’s your hit!” She looked up to see an egg fly from the back of the room. It arched into the smoky darkness above the gaslights.

  Instinctively she pulled out her skirt with both hands. The egg came down, lazy, almost hovering, it seemed so slow, and miraculously she caught it.

  “Thank you!” Charlotte shouted to the man in back. She held up the egg to the whoops and whistles of the crowd. “My son will have this for breakfast tomorrow.”

  But the next egg came in lower and flatter, and she didn’t see it until it was too la
te to duck. It caught her on the left shoulder and broke with a splat. Raw egg oozed down her sleeve.

  “At least it’s not rotten,” she tried to say, but the spell was broken. Two more eggs flew up, and some kind of vegetable—she couldn’t tell what it was, it flew past her so fast. A tomato? The manager stepped out, his arms waving, crying for order.

  Then another egg hit her on top of the head, and in a rush Turner charged past her, leaped off the stage in a single bound, and knocked over his antagonist, who was still standing at the footlights.

  “By God!” Turner cried. “Not my wife, you don’t!”

  “I didn’t throw nothing!” shouted the man. By then they were rolling in the center aisle, all fists and elbows, a knot of excited men piling on, though whether to stop the fight or join in it Charlotte could not be sure.

  An hour later they were back in the hotel. Charlotte had found some soap to wash her hair and sat in a chair to let it dry. Turner was lying on the bed, bruised though with no permanent damage, Adam resting against his shoulder.

  “Well, there’s a loss,” Turner said, his gaze on the ceiling.

  Charlotte did not answer. She knew what he meant: they had paid in advance for the lyceum, and their proceeds from the first two nights could hardly cover the loss of the third. She let her thoughts settle for a while.

  “Not necessarily,” she said after a bit.

  Turner tilted his head to view her. “Think they’d let me back in for another night?” he said.

  “He would if it meant a packed house. A packed house, all that food and drink he could sell. Cancel, and he gets none of that.”

  “All right,” Turner said in a doubtful voice.

  “But tomorrow night we need to plan better. When I come out and say my piece, it’s not because you’ve been bested by a heckler. We plan the moment.”

  “Oh, I can’t—”

  “And I get offstage before they start to throw things. And for heaven’s sake, don’t jump into the crowd. You’re lucky you didn’t break a bone.”

  Turner didn’t speak, but Charlotte could tell he was thinking. Together they sat in the lamplit room and contemplated the rest of the trip. If the spontaneous appearance of a suffrage-advocating woman socialist aroused tonight’s crowd to such a frenzy, what kind of turnout could they expect if it was advertised in advance? But there would be notoriety, anger, and no doubt more eggs. Or worse. And Turner—Turner would become something else. The side act, the butt of jokes, the man who couldn’t control his wife.

  “Not everyone will rent to us if they know you’re on the bill,” he said.

  “I would guess not,” Charlotte said.

  “We’d likely get run out of a few towns.”

  “Yes.” They both looked at Adam. Send him home or keep him close? Hard to decide.

  Turner rubbed his face. “All right,” he said.

  Chapter 13

  Emile Mercadier’s end came without warning. In January he developed a cough; in the first week of February he decided not to get out of bed one morning; and by the end of the month he was breathing fast and shallow, his heart fluttering, and his eyes vaguely focused on the wall. His mind wandered, and as Kathleen bathed his forehead he lost his sense of her, thinking back to his first wife, Josephine. Marie spelled her in the afternoons to let Kathleen have some quiet, though Kathleen never asked for it, and indeed when left to herself walked to Marie’s cabin to fix dinner and watch Josephine. “I don’t need crying time,” she told Marie. “What with my first husband and everything else we lost in the war, I cried myself out years ago. I am plenty acquainted with grief.”

  Flynn had sense enough not to complain about Marie’s time with her father, though she knew he was eager to marry. And why not? Surely it wasn’t too vain to think of herself as something of a catch. She could cook, she had a way with children, she could do his reading for him when necessary, perhaps even teach him to read. And you couldn’t fault the man for ambition, despite his evil moods and quick temper. It wasn’t an impossible partnership.

  She found herself alone with her father in the late afternoon of his death, Kathleen away sleeping, and a soft crackle of sleet on the roof. The room always seemed cold to her, no matter how she stoked the fire, but Emile didn’t complain.

  “Cherie,” he said. His voice was scratchy. He had been lapsing into French a great deal lately, and Marie was disheartened to realize that she could no longer speak it well.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “J’ai peur.”

  Marie stood up and walked fast into the front room. No one there. She opened the door. She could see into the front room of Mrs. Smith’s cabin next door, where Jenny the maid sat at her darning. There was a stick lying next to Marie’s feet; she tossed it at Jenny’s window, startling her out of her chair. She waved Jenny out to her door.

  “Please,” she called. “I need you to run down to my house and bring Mrs. Mercadier. I need her.”

  Something in Marie’s voice made Jenny run without asking questions. Marie walked rapidly back to her father’s bedside and took his hand again.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I am here.”

  “If the man from the Evening Post…” he said. But then he seemed to lose his train of thought and gazed at the ceiling. After a minute, he repeated, “J’ai peur.”

  Marie didn’t know what to say. Don’t be afraid? Why not be afraid? “I’m here,” she said, feeling inadequate. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Je n’ai peur pour moi,” he said. “Pour toi.”

  She felt a sudden chill. Who was supposed to be comforting whom here? She had nothing to say and didn’t want to ask why he was afraid for her and not for himself.

  There was a rustle behind her; Kathleen had been found. Marie tried to stand but felt Kathleen’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Stay,” Kathleen said. “He’s been your father longer than my husband. Stay where you are.”

  So she sat, Kathleen standing behind her, and watched. Her father’s lips moved a little but no sound came out. “Are you all right for this?” Kathleen murmured. “I think we’ve reached the end.”

  Marie didn’t answer but stayed where she was. Emile either did not hear or was unable to respond; his breath continued to rasp. Marie felt a tightness in her chest and realized that she had been holding her breath for several seconds. It felt good to let it out.

  Then his breathing stopped, and all was silent.

  Marie felt oddly disappointed. No final blessing, no words of wisdom, just breathe, and breathe, and then stop. Was that the sum of a man? Apparently so.

  The next several days were a blur of grieving, comforting, food, and decisions. With Turner away, the eulogy fell to John Wesley Wickman, who did a good job, though mild and halting. The tent Mr. Wilkinson had erected to shield his exhumation of Lysander Smith from prying eyes took up the front part of the cemetery, so Emile was buried toward the back, near the woods. Her father had always feared the forest, so it seemed wrong to have him back there. But so it was.

  Afterward came the parade of condolences, all sincere enough, she supposed, although her own feelings were too numb to register them much of the time. There seemed to be an expectation that she should do something now. But what to do, and how to do it, were never mentioned. And Flynn was always close by. He had muttered some condolences to her on the day her father died and stood in the crowd during the burial, but other than that he was silent about the wound, planting and clearing instead of talking. The ways of men. But every morning her woodbox was full, without a word spoken, and she appreciated Flynn’s silent attention. Nor did Dathan call on her, appropriately enough. But one evening she stepped out of her back door to fetch firewood and found a hot bowl on her chopping block, wrapped in a cloth. It was a thick stew of some sort, ground corn and squash and some sort of wild meat, and she could tell that the corn had been hand ground in a mortar, not milled between stones. It was bland and rather gamy, but filling. She had heard t
ales of Dathan’s Indian wife but had never seen her; she washed the empty bowl the next day and set it on the chopping block, and in the morning it was gone. That night it returned, refilled.

  After a month Flynn brought up the unspoken subject. “I guess you’ve put me off long enough,” he said, whittling a stick in her yard as they said farewell for the evening. “Or ain’t you going to marry me after all?”

  “No,” said Marie. “I’ll marry you.”

  “All right, then. I’ll go see the priest.”

  “Do we have to bring in the priest?”

  Flynn shot her an angry look. “You may not care about the Mother Church, but I do,” he said. “You should have sent for a priest back when your papa was passing. A man in his extreme moment needs all the comfort he can get.”

  Marie held her tongue. “All right, go talk to the priest.”

  A few days later he was back. “He’ll marry us any time,” he said. “But we have to make confession first. And I want to finish my fence. Won’t take me more than another couple of days.”

  On a surprisingly cold April day, he fetched her in his wagon, and they took the long ride to Fredericktown. Despite the chill, the redbud was in bloom, and its splashes of lavender brightened the dull gray-brown of the hillsides where the trees had not yet come into leaf. Marie could not help remembering the times she and Turner had ridden out in the wagon together, how filled she was with passion and curiosity and wonder, wonder at their mutual audacity and at her own, amazed at herself that she could be so fearless or reckless or whatever it was, and filled with the excitement of the forbidden. This trip felt nothing like that. She felt as though she was giving in, though giving in to what she did not know. The need to be normal, perhaps. The need to have a father—a real father—for Josephine. Then, she had ridden out in the wagon with the thrill of a girl; now, she was riding out to marry with the sobriety of an adult. She glanced at Flynn from time to time; he was a decent enough man, she guessed, the hardest-working man in the county, as he liked to say. She would have to learn how to talk to him.