This Old World

by Steve Wiegenstein

By the time Charley started walking from the main road down to Daybreak, it was sunset, or what would have been sunset if there had been any sun to see. His rain slicker had done him little good; he was drenched and shivering, and figured that just his luck somebody would have paddled the skiff to the other side. He would have to holler until someone heard him, someone who was brave or foolish enough to cross that damn river in near darkness.

  A glimpse of light and the smell of smoke from one of the huts in the Indian camp tempted him for a moment. But he was damned if he would take shelter with Dathan and his Indian bride, not half a mile from his own house. He worked his way down the bluff in the dwindling light, his lower half covered with mud from slipping on the wet rocks.

  As soon as Charley reached the river bottom, he knew he would never cross tonight. He could hear the river’s low roar and could smell the earthy musk of ground covered by water that shouldn’t be covered by water. Out of curiosity more than anything else, he walked ahead.

  Then he heard cries and shouts, and knew there was trouble. A lantern waved wildly through the trees. Charley ran toward it.

  Flynn, the fool, had built his house too close to the river. He had put everything too close to the river. By the time Charley got there, the hog lot was gone, and two feet of water covered the floor of the house. Flynn, Marie, Josephine, and Angus were frantically carrying everything out of the house to a hump of ground about a hundred feet back.

  “Carry it farther back!” Charley shouted as he dashed to help. “You’ll have to carry it again later tonight if it keeps raining.”

  “Go fuck yourself!” Flynn shouted in reply, holding up the lantern to see who had arrived. “Help or don’t help, suit yourself. We’ll carry it again once we get it all out.”

  Charley waded through the chill water to the back bedroom. The mattress was gone—removed already, or perhaps lost to the water—but the bed frame was still in place. He threw it over his shoulder and fought his way to the door. The children were wading around in the front room, chasing floating papers and toys.

  Charley half-floated, half-carried the bed frame to the spot of high ground, followed by the children with armloads of goods. The water was only a couple of feet from it already, and he could feel the current tugging at his ankles. He tossed it onto the highest spot, where Marie and Josephine struggled to throw a canvas over a pile of clothing.

  “That ain’t worth doing,” he said, but helped her anyway. Flynn arrived with a trunk over his shoulder.

  “God damn river,” he said.

  Marie put on a brave face. “Now we can start building that octagon house you are always talking about,” she said. “We’ll put it back here on the high ground.” Flynn just shot her an angry look, and she fell silent.

  Charley didn’t want to get between them at this moment. He returned to their flooded house and waded in the door, feeling with his feet for anything that might be a possession. Flynn arrived with the lantern, and together they surveyed the interior.

  “It’ll clean up,” Charley said.

  “I know that. I don’t need consoling,” said Flynn. They walked into the back room. Nothing left to carry out but a crucifix on the wall. It was ingeniously made, with grapevines twisted into the shape of a man on a cross of two neatly mortised slats.

  “I did that,” Flynn said, taking it down.

  “Nice work,” Charley said.

  “Damn straight. Now let’s see if we can salvage some of my rails.”

  From the house to the river, Flynn’s rail fence gradually disappeared into the brown water.

  “River’s still rising,” Charley said. “Some of them rails are halfway to the state line by now.”

  “I put a lot of work into these rails,” Flynn replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay you for your time.”

  “Don’t insult me,” Charley said. He waded into the water and started pulling rails, which was a tougher job than it looked. Flynn had fixed each length with two uprights, cross-and-rail style, and in some places he had tied the crossed uprights together. Charley had to admit as he tugged at the rails that Flynn had done a fine job of fence-building.

  Finally Charley got some loose and tossed them behind him. Angus, chest-deep, scurried to fetch them.

  “Push ’em into the shallows,” Flynn said. “We’ll collect them in a minute.”

  Flynn waded further into the water to pull out more rails. Charley stayed where he was, groping in the dark for the bottom ones.

  Angus followed his father, who handed the lantern to him. “Here, boy,” he said. “Just hold this high so I can see. I need to work with both hands.”

  It seemed to Charley that they were in the hog lot. He remembered that Flynn had curved his fence inward here so there was only a narrow V leading to the water. He felt his way past Flynn to where the ground dropped off, what in normal times would be the riverbank.

  “You ain’t getting anything past here,” he called out to Flynn.

  Flynn glanced up from his work and nodded.

  Angus, too, came forward to see, holding the lantern high in one hand while corralling a couple of rails with the other. Charley thought to warn him not to come too far, that the ground sloped down very quickly and the current was strong, but Angus pushed forward before he could speak. He could tell that the boy was about to say something, because he opened his mouth, but then the rails slipped out of his hand into the deeper water. Charley made a grab for them; Angus made a grab for them. Charley cried out—no words, just a shout, which got Flynn’s attention. He saw what was about to happen and reached for his son.

  But the water slowed them down as they grabbed for Angus; the boy’s expression was startled, then frightened, as he stepped in a hole. His head bobbed under the surface of the floodwater. Then the lantern went underwater as well. All was dark, and Angus was gone.

  Chapter 17

  They had built a rude chicken coop in the woods out of tied-together sassafras saplings and salvaged fence rails; it was enough to keep out the foxes, but that was all. Marie could only hope that a bear wouldn’t come by. But eggs were down, and as Marie collected them one afternoon she could see one reason why.

  A three-foot blacksnake was curled in one of the nests, its body lumpy from the eggs it had swallowed; Marie could count two, perhaps three. She gazed at it. Surely it was aware of her presence, but it did not move.

  There was an egg in the nest beside it. She needed to gather it. But if she reached down for the egg, the snake would bite her.

  Once she would have called for Angus. He had no fear of these creatures. He would have laughed at her dread and picked it up, carried it off to the far woods somewhere.

  But now there was no Angus, and she couldn’t call Michael. He would just take his almighty ax and kill it, perhaps give her a cuff for taking him away from his work, leaving her to deal with the bloody remains. She would kill it herself.

  But of course she wouldn’t, she no more had it in her to kill that snake than to take wings and fly. Michael was wrong about many things, but he was right about this one—she was a soft woman, soft to the core, unsuited for the strife and scrabble of a working existence. For Michael everything was war. He was at war with the railroad builders who were always wanting to work him an extra hour for no extra money. He was at war with Ferguson in town, who had loaned him the money for the cattle. He was at war with Daybreak across the river, although she doubted if they were aware of it. Marie wasn’t sure if he considered her an ally in his wars or another enemy. Probably some of both.

  At first this feeling had worked in their favor. He was angry, she was angry, and in the night they turned their anger into a strange sort of passion. They gripped each other’s biceps, they couldn’t bear to have clothing on, they pressed their faces together as if trying to push through to bone. It was animal, and it was good. Sometime in the early spring they had made a baby, although she hadn’t told him yet. She wasn’t that far along.

  But then the rains came, and
the farm flooded, and Angus was lost. There was no longer any way to turn Michael’s anger into anything warm or productive. The cloud under which he labored was impenetrably dense.

  The first time he had struck her, she had cried, naturally. A slap across the cheek hurts. But the look on his face—proud, belligerent—gave her to know that tears would only make things worse. So she did not cry anymore, not even the time when he had popped her shoulder out of joint. She took a perverse pride in that.

  She had felt worse things than the bite of a snake.

  She reached into the nest, grasped the egg, warm in her fingers. She drew out her hand.

  The snake did not bite.

  Marie put the egg in her apron pocket and bent her way out the makeshift door of the coop. Small victories, but she would take them however she got them.

  The night Angus had drowned was a blur to her now. She remembered the chill of the water, the gritty filth of it in her shoes. She remembered Michael flinging himself into it again and again, Charley Pettibone dragging him out, a mad scramble to find poles or ropes, anything to locate Angus, and their failure, the dread realization that came over them, and Michael now in a frenzy, words and cries that made no sense, and then the fear. Charley had led them up the hill to the Indian camp, where Dathan and Cedeh wrapped them in blankets. Then unconsciousness, till morning when they descended the slippery hill again to find that Michael had gathered all their possessions and piled them on a high spot farther back, and there he lay upon them asleep, like the old tales of a dragon and its hoard.

  They went for days without speaking. Men and women came by to comfort them, left food, but Michael turned them away or retreated to the woods when he saw them coming. There was no funeral because there was nothing to bury. Marie lived in dread of the moment when the waters would recede and reveal Angus, lodged in a willow grove or trapped in a root wad, for then all would be raw and fresh again and Michael’s madness would return. But no Angus ever appeared as the river returned to its banks. Their grief turned to a dull, hollow pain, no less painful despite the dullness, the pain of an amputation rather than that of a wound.

  Now, months later, Michael was no less mad but had grown cunning. He had built a ferry where the flood had washed out the river crossing, and sometimes in the night he deepened the hole. “Mother Nature needs our help,” he would say, slipping out the door barefoot, a shovel in his hand. He worked without a lantern so the people in Daybreak wouldn’t see him, although she didn’t know why it mattered; they kept a wagon on their side of the river and crossed in a skiff, swimming the horses. Marie suspected it was just the thrill of getting away with something that spurred him to secrecy. Hardly two travelers a week came by, so it wasn’t as though the ferry made them much money.

  Marie cradled the eggs in her apron pocket. She supposed she should find Josephine and get her started in the garden. Beans were coming up and needed to be weeded. But as she emerged from the woods into the house clearing, Josephine was already out there, bent down, pulling the weeds from the roots just as she had shown her. She did not speak as Marie passed by.

  Marie placed the eggs on the counter and thought about lunch. Now that it was just the two of them during the week, she sometimes forgot lunch until mid-afternoon; she felt as if she was just pushing through the days, barely able to distinguish one from another, morning from night. There were only two parts to the day, Michael-at-home and Michael-away. During Michael-away you prepared, you anticipated, you waited; and during Michael-at-home you stayed alert and ready for whatever might happen. But it was never possible to be alert and ready enough.

  Her thoughts of lunch were interrupted by the ringing of the bell for the ferry. Just her luck, somebody needing to cross and Michael not here to do it. She would have to haul it across herself.

  Marie walked to the river crossing. Cowling, Mrs. Smith’s man, stood on the other bank.

  “Tell your husband we need his boat,” he said, a little grouchy.

  “Right now?”

  He shook his head. “After lunch. We are removing.”

  “How many wagons?”

  “Two.”

  Marie considered. Two heavily loaded wagons meant two trips across, plus another for the people. Whatever else one might say about Michael, he was a good man with a device. He had braided a heavy rope around a cottonwood tree on their side of the river, then paddled across and done the same on the Daybreak side. With ropes attached to the corners of the ferry and looped over the crossing line, it no longer took much strength to pull the ferry across; even Marie could walk it over, advancing each rope a foot or two at a time. Michael would be happy at the money from three crossings in a single day.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll watch for you.”

  “Husband not at home?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  As they stood across the river from each other, a boy came into view downstream, poling his way toward them from the rear of a twelve-foot johnboat. He worked slowly and steadily and gave no sign he noticed them until he was almost even. He looked about fourteen or fifteen, in a coarse cotton shirt and a wide-brimmed hat that had to have been someone else’s originally. He tipped it to her as he poled toward her bank.

  “This the Daybreak landing, ma’am?” the boy said.

  “It is.”

  He steered the boat straight in, and as soon as the bow touched land he skipped lightly over the cross-members, the pole horizontal in his hands, and hopped ashore with dry feet. He dragged the johnboat farther onto the bank.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said. “I been standing at the tail end of this thing for three days. Be good to walk on my own two feet for a while.”

  Across the river, Cowling waved and turned away. Marie ignored him.

  “They told me I wouldn’t be able to pole any farther than the Daybreak landing,” the boy said. “That right?”

  “Probably so,” Marie said. “The shut-ins start just around the next bend. You could never get a boat through there. Three days, you say?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Been walking for two days before that. I’m from Paragould, Arkansas, but I found this boat up in Missouri.”

  “Found it tied to somebody’s dock, you mean?”

  The boy grinned. “Shame on you, ma’am, for thinking ill of a man. Fact is, I’m headed north to look for work. Know anything going on?”

  “There’s a railroad crew just south of here. You probably paddled right past them.”

  “This is a pole, ma’am, not a paddle, and yes I did, or at least I could hear their hammers a ways off. I ain’t the hammering kind of fellow.” With his pole, he plucked a cloth bag from the middle thwart and flipped it into his hands.

  “No work in Arkansas?”

  The boy puckered his face. “I’m tired of flat land. If I’m going to live on the flat, I’d like to have people in it.”

  “Well, there’s work across the river if you want it. Hundred acres under cultivation and not enough men to manage it.”

  His face puckered again. “I never fancied myself a field hand. But what’s it pay?”

  “Room and board, and your share at harvest time.”

  The boy snorted. “No thank you very much,” he said. “Working on shares is not my play. What’s in it for me, that’s my question.”

  That was everybody’s question nowadays, Marie supposed, the brash new generation bowing before the cold new realities of cash only, please, and payment on demand, and every man for himself.

  “Well, I’m off,” the boy said, interrupting her thoughts. “Mind watching my boat for me? I’ll be back to get it.”

  “What’s in it for me?” Marie retorted.

  He laughed. “Point well made, ma’am. Tell you what, if I ain't back in a month, you can sell it or claim it, and no harm done. How’s that?”

  “Fine,” Marie said.

  The boy slung his bag over his shoulder and marched up the road toward Fredericktown. “Hey, by the way,” he called ov
er his shoulder. “Know what I heard in Greenville? I heard some of Quantrill’s old bunch are headed down this way. They robbed the bank up in Liberty a couple of months ago, and they’re going to Kentucky or Tennessee or somewhere.”

  “Just hope that wasn’t their boat you took,” Marie called after him.

  “Them boys don’t ride boats. They never even get off their horses,” the boy said as he disappeared up the hill.

  “You should have made him pay you to watch his boat,” said a voice behind her. Marie jumped. It was Josephine, of course, creeping up as she always did. She stepped out from behind a bush. “He had money in that bag.”

  “Now how do you know that?” Marie said.

  “I heard it. He had it wrapped, but I could hear it plain as day.”

  “I don’t doubt you.” Marie put her arm over Josephine’s shoulder and they walked to the house. Marie never knew what to make of the girl, daughter though she was. She had to credit Michael—for all his humors, he had never unreasonably raised his hand to the child. Or was it that Josephine knew how to manage his moods so that his wrath was always directed elsewhere? No matter. Josephine was not paying the price for her unwise marriage, and that was what counted.

  “Mr. Flynn will be pleased at the ferry earnings today,” Josephine said, as if reading her mind. Never called him ‘Papa’ or anything endearing. But Marie didn’t remonstrate; the girl had a father, after all.

  After lunch the ferry bell rang, and the two of them walked to the riverbank. Josephine was not tall enough to reach the rope and pull the ferry across, but she could help the passengers load and unload, which she always did without being told.

  It looked as though the entire Daybreak community was on the other side, gathered with Mrs. Smith and her retinue at the landing. Marie pulled the ferry across while Cowling began to swim the horses over, two at a time.

  “I’ll need two of those to pull your wagons onto the ferry,” Marie said to him midstream.

  “I know that,” Cowling said, grouchy.

  The oversized wooden casket Wickman had built to hold Lysander Smith’s coffin took up one entire wagon, wedged in place by crates and boxes. Wilkinson, the undertaker, appeared to be in charge of that one. He eyed her suspiciously.