A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  “He is and I am.”

  “You’re working for him?”

  “I’m there. And I’m working.”

  “He has need of you? Or is he accommodating you?”

  “What I seen, he has need of me. My sister, Becca, she told me he usually hires a man for the summer, in fact was looking to do so when—well, when the news come. And he and she went to the doctor and fetched me back. And I been helping right on along. We got his first cut of hay in and Calvin Fulton showed up with the mules and I used em just a couple of days ago to ride a cultivator through his corn. And . . .”

  Harlan went silent and held it and Malcolm breathed and waited.

  Finally Harlan said, “It’s a good enough place for the time being and I’m grateful for it. But you’re the man I work for. And there’s work needs to be done. You and me, we both know I’m the only one can stand and tell how it was. What happened after you left. What sort a man Amos Wheeler was. And I’ll do it. I’m here to tell you that. And there’s that lawyer—”

  “He has been to see me.” Malcolm went silent.

  Harlan said, “Then you know—”

  Malcolm said, “I have no interest in what he said. I want you to go back to where you now are and work like the dickens for that man. Make him proud to have you there and let him see just how worthy you are. Perhaps he will take you on year-round. You say your sister is already there? That’s good; she may be able to sway him if he holds any doubts of you, although I’d say after a few more weeks he’ll want you as a full-time hand. And this, also: I give you the mules. If they help secure a position there, so much the better. But if they seem a liability, if the man does not have enough use for them or doesn’t want to feed them through the winter, you may dispose of them and pocket the cash money. Perhaps, if the farm is lean of work during the winter months, such money might allow you to board through those times. It sounds the right place for you, now.”

  Harlan sat on the stool, tipped a bit sideways, his face in a quizzed pinch. Finally he said, “I’m not understanding you.”

  Malcolm breathed. His vision had cleared and the basement was brilliant as if flooded by some light carried in upon the shoulders of the boy. He said, “You know why I’m here?”

  Harlan said, “I know what brung you here.”

  “No. You do not. You may think so but you don’t. I murdered a man and I murdered my wife. That is what I did. Cast the story any way you want but the end remains the same. Now, go. Make that home it sounds you already have. But leave me, Harlan. Leave me to what is mine.”

  The mute boy on the stool did not comprehend what was being said.

  Malcolm stood from his hard platform bunk, his knees cracking and threatening weakness as he rose. He stepped to the bars of the cage and the boy also rose up from his stool and stood, his face drained.

  Gently as he could, Malcolm said, “The state will hang me for what I did. As they should. Truth is I’ll welcome it. I’d not want life after what I did. You go on, you’re but a boy and can’t understand. One day you might, but I hope dearly you won’t. Go. Now. I’m done with talk. I’m done with it all.”

  He then turned and walked to the back of his cage and placed his hands upon the bars and stood upright. Dreading that the boy might speak, that he would not understand. It was very quiet in the basement, quiet enough so Malcolm heard the faint whir of a fly striking the window glass, heard the scrape of the stool legs pushed back, shoe-soles gaining purchase as the boy stood. Heard the boy draw breath as if he would speak again. That breath held a great time and no words came but finally an exhalation as a burst upon the room and then the rush of feet up the stairs and the hidden door snapping to.

  Malcolm Hopeton turned and lifted his hands to hold his head and staggered to the bunk and sank swift and hard upon it. Still holding his head.

  Harlan was in the horse sheds behind the courthouse, breathless and crimped, with no sense or memory of how he’d gotten there, no memory of anything he’d seen or heard or if anyone had spoken to him or even noticed him as he exited the building, unsure if he’d run the whole way or strolled out seemingly cool. He lay up against the side of Bart, who was, unaccountably, still working at the small pile of hay Harlan had fetched some very long time ago, leaned against the mule and buried his face in the sweet, dusty hide and got his breath back. Then finally thought to look back outside the sheds to see if anyone had followed him.

  He was alone, but for the mule.

  Ways, this most recent vision of Malcolm Hopeton was even more terrible than the lunatic seen days before, Hopeton so cool and lacking all passion as he’d stood and proclaimed his fate and acceptance, even his embrace of that fate. A man otherwise brave and strong wanting to die. As if he’d forgotten all Harlan and he’d discussed those weeks after his walking back in from the war.

  And Harlan then understood that Hopeton had not so much forgotten as he was grief-maddened and, though appearing calm, was out of his mind. There was no other explanation possible.

  Which meant he’d forgotten all he’d learned about Amos Wheeler; and that was wrong. Harlan Davis, collapsed against a mule for comfort, knew it to be wrong. And because it was wrong, knew he could not let it stand so.

  He pushed off the mule and stood upright. In that moment he knew he was alone and also knew that alone he was not enough. He’d be seen as a boy willing to say anything to save a man he’d worked for, a man he’d come to admire. Most importantly a man who had killed another man and his own wife in a terrible moment and Harlan the sole witness, if only a partial witness. And thought of Enoch Stone and how that man had ambushed him and saw how he could be so easily torn all those ways if he alone tried to stand in a courtroom and tell how it had been. Not that terrible day, not the weeks after Malcolm returned from the war. But the years before that. For only by understanding those years could people make judgment on the rage of that day.

  He needed someone else. Some other person who could also tell how it had been.

  Bart lifted his head and stamped, flicked his tail at flies and shook his head and neck and dropped down to eat again. And it came to Harlan who he needed. In the whole wide living world there was only one other person who could tell the sort of man Amos Wheeler had been. Could also, perhaps, tell a bit about the mess Bethany Hopeton had found herself caught up in. Though he was less sure about that last part.

  He didn’t have the first idea about where to start. But a tickle at the back of his mind told him he did. He walked out of the shed and went to the privy and sitting there in the high stink of a hot day, took off his brogan and pulled out the twenty-dollar gold piece and stuck it in his trouser pocket. And perhaps it was the stink or some other clarity against the risk of memory but it came to him. The day the winter before when he’d left the house to go to Hopeton’s barn, sent by Mrs. Hopeton to seek eggs so she could bake a cake, and been stopped short, hearing Amos talking and the girl talking back and he’d stood silent as a post hidden in the passage between the chicken coop and the horse barn as he listened.

  It was a slender thread but all he had and so within minutes had led Bart out of the shed and mounted the mule and gone down through the streets of the town to the landing of the Outlet Canal. From there he turned east along the towpath through the gorge toward Dresden, it being the shortest route he knew to travel the five miles. He’d pass by the wide meadow in the gorge where the Wheeler family had their camp but he was emboldened by the report from Enoch Stone that all were gone from there save perhaps Amos Wheeler’s mother, who, even if she were still there, would not know Harlan from Adam. And though he’d never been there he guessed, it being the nature of the Wheelers, that the camp was not right up against the canal and towpath. And he intended to kick up Bart and pass through there fast as he could. All he wanted was to get to Dresden fast as he could, hoping to find Alice Ann Labidee.

  When he arrived at Dresden he rode up from the landing to higher ground above the village and on to the hotel, a square,
red-painted structure with a modest signboard on the entrance porch above the steps. As he tied Bart to the simple rail under a butternut tree for shade, he heard the snuffling gulps and nipped squeals of hungry swine and followed toward the source, around to the back of the building. Jutting behind was an unpainted weathered cookhouse with a rear door, three rough steps, a thick stovepipe rising from the wood-shingled roof, with a pale steady stream of smoke rising. The yard was packed earth, and twenty feet from the bottom of the steps was the drop-off into the Outlet gorge. Against that was a fenced enclosure holding a dozen or so shoats trundling about an empty trough. The smell was high and the pigs watched Harlan. Inside the pen there was a cut-down barrel for water and in one corner a few planks cobbled together to make a rough shelter from sun or rain.

  The slap of the kitchen door roused him from this standing slumber. A large woman with pinned hair under a cap, clad in a washed-thin dress with a heavy splotched apron, feet stuffed into laceless men’s boots, came out hugging a steaming tub against her chest. She maneuvered the steps downward with a certain caution; then, her feet hard upon the ground, her eyes came up from the job and she saw Harlan.

  “Stand back,” she cried out. “I can’t stop.”

  She swaggered along with the tub. It looked like hard going to Harlan.

  He said, “Do you need a hand with that?”

  She went on, spitting behind her, but not at him. At the hog pen she lifted the tub a bit and dumped the contents into the trough. The pigs strove and dove, flailing corked tails.

  The woman turned and dropped the tub and reached up to press her cheeks with her hands. “What are you lurking after, pie-eye?” she asked, without much heat to the question.

  “You must be the cook,” he said. “I was hoping to buy a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m Bertha Pinckney, the owner of this sweet honey-pot since my husband run off to get rich in Kansas ten years ago and I ain’t seen nor heard from him since. I got a pot a coffee on the back of the stove, made strong for me. The drummers and flimflams get it watered down.”

  “I could use a cup of strong coffee. Cash money.”

  “Um-hmm,” she said. “And hungry, too. Get up the stairs, I’ll be right behind you.”

  The room was vast, steaming hot. Bertha Pinckney poured coffee from an oversized pot into a cup pulled from a shelf of them, curiosity bright in her eyes. She said, “Take that stool at the table. No, not that one, the one the other side of the range, next to the larder. This stool’s mine, so’s I can perch and watch the stove.”

  The stove was a wide-topped iron giant with double ovens, a five-gallon pot steaming at the rear, oversized skillets filled with chopped onions and potatoes browning, one of calf’s liver, one of brown gravy speckled with coarse black pepper. She bent and opened an oven and basted a pan of trussed roasting chickens. On the table before him was a baked ham sweating juice and a platter stacked with tiers of biscuits, corn dodgers and sliced rounds of steamed molasses bread.

  Harlan took the coffee and moved to the appointed stool, unsure how to proceed. So he plunged.

  He said, “Can I confide in you?”

  She spread wide over the opposite stool and held her coffee between both hands, the enameled cup disappeared.

  “A course you can.”

  He nodded and said, “My name’s Harlan Davis and—”

  “Oh!” she said and looked away. Then, “I heard your name. You were up to your knees in that mess in Milo, weren’t you.” And swiftly added, “What the papers said, anyway.”

  “I was more at the edge of it, though I did get clouted on the head, sorta by accident. It was a terrible business all right, but not what most people think.”

  Now her brow was furrowed by thought or worry and Harlan guessed if Alice Ann Labidee wasn’t here she had been recently. So he waited and sipped the strong coffee that had the vague taste of licorice root.

  She couldn’t help curiosity. “How so was it different?”

  He shrugged. “Simple. All the talk for years was how Missus Hopeton and Amos Wheeler was paired up, stealing money and such grain and livestock as they could turn into cash. But it was Amos Wheeler all along; I was there. I seen it. Missus Hopeton didn’t have no say once Wheeler took charge.”

  She said, “I seen them in here a few times. I ain’t so sure of what you say about her, but that Wheeler, he was a nasty piece of work.”

  “That is the Lord’s truth, ever it was spoke.”

  “You’re a godly boy.”

  “I am. I was raised as such. I only stuck it those last years cause I’d promised Mr. Hopeton. And I felt bad for Missus Hopeton, though I couldn’t see a thing to do about it. There wasn’t no one to listen to me.”

  She nodded and then heaved off her stool and poured more coffee for the both of them, then took up a knife and sliced slabs of ham onto a plate set before him, added a half-dozen biscuits and pushed a crock of dark honey across toward him, another of butter. “Them biscuits won’t be good cold. You eat up.”

  He looked at the food, looked back at her and said, “I appreciate it.” And went to working on the food. Bertha Pinckney stood spraddle-legged and forked biscuits, molasses bread, more ham onto his plate as quickly as he cleaned it. All the while the both of them hedged and hunkered, both knowing the question nudging for entry into the room.

  Harlan finished up slowly and, without standing, dug in his pocket and pulled forth the double eagle and set it beside his plate. “My goodness,” he said. “That was a feast and badly needed.”

  She eyed the coin and filled his coffee again. She said, “I was raised New Light Baptist myself but have mostly fell away as life will do to you. What is it you’re after, here?”

  “I’m looking for Miss Alice Ann Labidee.”

  “I never heard that name.”

  “There’s a man’s life hangs in the balance.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “She was done wrong by Amos Wheeler, that’s common knowledge. All I want is to talk to her. Nothing more.”

  Bertha Pinckney again raised her bulk, this time effortless as breathing and turned to the stove. She pushed pans back and forth, turned slabs of beef liver, stirred the contents of the big pot. Then reached up to the shelf above the stove and brought down a stoppered bottle lost in her large hand. She turned and pulled the cork with her teeth and poured a thin short stream into her own cup. Placed the bottle back on the shelf and again filled her cup with coffee and then Harlan’s. She put the big blackened tin pot back on the stove and stood at the table and sipped from her cup, taking a pause, waiting for the coffee and infusion to strike within her. All that time studying Harlan with wide blue eyes frank and true upon him before she set her cup down and looked up to the smoke-strewn rafters and daubed plaster.

  She looked back to Harlan and said, “I won’t see her come to harm. She’s a good girl and ain’t got a friend in this world.”

  “I’m only looking to talk to her. And, I beg your pardon, but you’re wrong on that account.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’d say she has a friend and a good one. That, or she pays you right well.”

  Bertha flushed red and said, “Oh my Lord, child, she ain’t got a dime to her name, not these days.”

  “Can I ask how she landed here? And how she’s keeping herself?”

  Bertha paused then and set her chins upon the knuckles of one hand and pursed her eyes into a soft distance. Finally she said, “She does the best she can. The answer to your first question, you’ll have to get from her, if she’s willing to share it.”

  Harlan understood he’d just made the first hurdle. Or second or third; he was unable to parse the moment to make a count. He said, “She came to you and you took her in, in her hour of need. Much the same has happened to me. You’re a kind soul and true, I can say that freely. I’ll also promise you her whereabouts is hidden with me, unless she allows otherwise. Swear my solemn heart.”

  Bertha Pinc
kney heaved herself upright from her stool again and walked around the table, pausing by the range to rearrange the assembly of skillets from hot to cool in an order known only to herself, then went on to a wire-caged pantry where she lifted down a brown clay bottle with a wax-sealed cap and locked back the pantry before setting the bottle before Harlan. Still wordless, she took down a tin tea canister and filled it with coffee, milk and a prodigious amount of sugar. Thought a moment with her hands on her hips, then pointed at the door leading to the interior of the hotel and spoke.

  “Carry this up to her. She’s not a drinking girl like some but will likely welcome the beer with you surprising her such a way. Once you pass through that door, another opens onto the back stairs. Take them all the way to the top and you’ll find yourself under the eaves. Up there, there ain’t but the one door what opens onto my cramped quarters. She’s camped with me. If she don’t want to see you, you respect that and leave her be. I hear her make a sound I’ll be up those stairs in a fury. You doubt me?”

  Harlan had stood. “No, Ma’am, not for a second.”

  She studied him again hard and reached and pushed the gold piece across the table. She said, “Some people can’t purchase a thing from me, try as they might.”

  He stood and stuck the coin in his pocket and took up the bottle of beer in one hand, the canister of hot coffee in the other and said, “I thank you.”

  The rear stairs were narrow and lit only by transom windows set high in the landings, the walls unpainted beadboard. Harlan climbed quietly, slowly. He came to the door at the top of the stairs, paused, and listened; but all was silent except for the faintest creaking where the heat of the day worked against contracting clapboarding. Still he doubted she was the sort to sleep in until almost noon. Even Amos Wheeler had not done that. Not much. Bethany had, upon occasion. Or at least hid out in her bedroom. Harlan had never been able to decide which it was, the times he put his mind to the question. Much the same as he never knew what corner he’d turn, what door open, or shadow in the barn move to reveal Wheeler when least expected. The oily mirthless laugh when Harlan took fright. It all felt like long ago, and only yesterday.