A Slant of Light

by Jeffrey Lent

  As she spoke her face was ripped hard in a wild anger and Harlan knew this was also the woman being revealed to him. The water flowing cool and soothing around him, her eyes a hard-glanced green as high dusk.

  He said, “Just when did you figure that out?”

  She took a deep breath, his eyes falling helpless to her heaved breasts and she said, “I asked myself that. The truth is I knew it before I’d allow myself to allow that I did. The way you can know a thing is wrong but you want so bad for it not to be that you pretend it’s something else altogether. Or that it’s not even there at all.”

  She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I’m not talking about you and me.”

  “I know that.”

  She said, “It’s more like about what Amos made you do. You understand that?”

  Even in the cool of the water he felt his face go hot and his eyes swam and he looked away from her. But after a moment he said, “I know that, too.”

  That night, heat lightning stippled the sky through the chestnut leaves and far-distant thunder sounded in rolling tattoos, but there was no wind and the air hung dense and heavy about him as Harlan hunkered out in the clearing watching what he could of the storm that was passing far to the south of them. Lacking wind, the storm seemed unlikely to make rain, at least nowhere close by; and his thoughts returned to August Swartout and Malcolm Hopeton and he worried he was not doing the job he should be doing. Even if now it truly seemed the best hope for Malcolm Hopeton was for Harlan to stay distant and hidden from Enoch Stone. All ways. She left him be, as if she knew his thoughts or even only the need to break away a time. Which he’d only discovered himself.

  Later in the night the air freshened and drew cool about them, enough so they roused from slumber and pulled blankets from under them to coil together beneath, the heat of their bodies now a different pleasure and he had a moment when he thought of how a winter night might be, lying so. Then cast it from his mind, knowing without once venturing beyond thought, approaching words at all, that this time was in all ways short and so a gift and let it be so. He slept and when he woke the day about them was thin and clear as water in a jar, the leaves on the canopy above the cabin no longer a blur of heat shimmer but each distinct as a paper cut and placed against the sky. No rain had fallen, none would soon. He rose up vigored and renewed and she was as well, the fire pokered up and coffee boiling as they coupled, then ate as if neither could last recall when a crust of blue-molded bread had passed their mouths.

  He wanted to ask her the plan for the following day but did not. If there were questions or discussions needed they’d have time come that dawn. Knowing this was the final day of nothing but lost within each other.

  Come the afternoon they lay fallen back head to foot of each other, both propped on pillows, a linen sheet twisted in a rope over their midsections, the air hot again but yet clear, draughts pulsed through the door and window-chunks. A cottontail she’d brought in earlier from a snare, then skinned and quartered, was in a spider over the coals, stewing with potatoes and bright new onions he guessed had come from the bit of garden he and Malcolm Hopeton had got in, steam lifting rich and dense against the brightened air.

  She moved about the bed so she lay beside him and reached a finger to stroke along his jaw, the prickle of stubble there. If Amos Wheeler had left a razor in the cabin Harlan had not gone seeking it, even as stubble bruised his jaw and cheeks.

  “Why’d you never leave?” she asked. “With all he done, not just to you but Bethany Hopeton also? Why’d you stay and stay?”

  To mild surprise he found the question did not bother him. He propped one ankle over the other and let his eyes drift toward the low dark rafters and considered his response.

  After a time he said, “Mr. Hopeton hired me some months before he went off in that fall of sixty-one. So I thought I had a pretty good idea how things worked before he ever went. A couple days before he left he found me one day in the mule pens and told me he hadn’t any notion how long he’d be gone but reckoned it would be a good while and told me also he was counting on me to stick to it, however long it was. I hadn’t a thought of doing otherwise and told him so and he grinned and shook my hand and told me we was agreed, then. During those months I never got a sense he didn’t harbor a thing but trust for Amos Wheeler and why would I? If he’d known a hint of what Amos had in mind he’d either not of gone or hired a able man and not a scrap of a boy. When I finally saw how things was turning I didn’t know why, or how bad it would get. All I knew was he’d asked me to keep an eye on things. So even when it got bad I reckoned I could do that. And I did.”

  “That’s uncommon thinking,” she said.

  “Maybe so. And I been studying it and know it was more than been hired on, given a job and a trust too. It was how I was raised.” He paused and said, “You ever heard of the Public Friend?”

  “You talking about that maphrodite preacher?”

  “What’s a maphrodite?”

  “It’s a person has both male and female parts.”

  He considered the possibility of such configuration, intrigued. Then he said, “I don’t know anything about that. The Friend was a mighty preacher and it’s true she was a celibate and some of those that followed her preaching was also. Not many but some. That gets me back to how I was raised, and likely why I done what I done for Mr. Hopeton.”

  “A celibate? Someone who don’t have any relations, is that right?”

  “Well, they have relations all right. Just all behind em, most gone out of Time. No little chaps or such, no husbands or wives.”

  “Relations is what you and I been getting up to. Fucking.”

  He rubbed a finger along his chin and then said, “All right. It amounts to the same thing, I guess. But you asked and I was trying to explain why I hung in there with all that trash Amos Wheeler put on me. And Bethany Hopeton.”

  “Yes. How was it you was raised so as to hold steady through it?”

  “It’s a story,” he said. “From long before I was born. There was a old man who mostly raised me and he told me this story happened when he himself was a chap but he recalled it clear as a bell ever after. And I was of a doubtful mind, a orphan child myself and my sister mostly gone into the world even it was but a couple miles away and I seen her every few days. But it was what was to come had me worried, truth being I had no idea what was to come and just old enough to know that, which caused me to be doubtful.”

  “Are you going to tell me the story or only all about your worried mind?” She softened the jest of her voice by running a palm over his chest.

  “This he told me,” he said. “The Public Friend and the couple hundred people that come with her, families and odd ones, were the first to settle this country but of course it wasn’t so long after them that others got wind of it and at first trickled in and then a flood of em. So what started as the New Jerusalem was turned into a redoubt for them folks and there was a plenty of em that were made uncomfortable by The Friend and the people about her. Now we’re talking ten, fifteen years along. First thing was some of those newcomers tried to get the court to get her up on charges of heresy but the court wouldn’t touch it: The community had a charter from the state that allowed em to be as a church. Still, them new settlers wouldn’t let it rest and some fool started a story about how The Friend claimed she could walk on water like our Lord did after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, if I got that right. Now, The Friend didn’t care a spit what any man said about her; she’d learned that lesson over and again. But she was a strong soul, no way around that for all she done. So she had a broadside printed up about how she’d hold a meeting with all welcome on the first Sunday of October down below the Four Corners where there was a nice lay of open land that led right down to the lakeshore and invited all doubters to come witness her walk on water, if such was what was required to bring them to the Lord. She spat mud in their eye, right there—suggesting those newcomers were lacking in their own faith.


  “So come that first Sunday in October and by nine in the morning there was five hundred people gathered, maybe a third of em followers of The Friend, and that was the appointed hour printed in the bills. And The Friend was not there. But buggies and wagons kept rolling in to see the show and by ten there was over a thousand people all milling and some angry talk, some folks commencing to eat the dinners they’d brung in baskets for after the show and kids splashing in the lake and calling out how they was walking on water the way kids will do. But mostly it was a solemn crowd that kept on swelling and those followers of her were getting nervous: A good many of em had spoke up against her making such a show anyways but she’d just told em to hush and wait and see. Then at half past ten The Friend’s chay rolled in and she stood down out of it with her broad-brimmed hat on her head and her long, brown, plain smock dress and she walked up to the highest point of land there where she could look down around the entire crowd—not above em but right in the middle where she could see all of em and they all could see and hear her. And she began to preach. She wasn’t no fire and brimstone preacher but spoke only of Christ and his teachings and how to live a life in the shadow of that gentle Lord who walks side by side with each and every one of us each and every hour of the day, who carries our travails and guides us on our way if we only but ask. She went on like that until sometime in the early afternoon.

  “I never heard her, a course, and there was never any of her words written down: She wouldn’t have it, saying all any of us needed was to listen to our hearts close enough and Jesus would enter upon us and speak Himself. And I guess maybe that’s true because every time I wondered was I doing the right thing, or was I doing the wrong thing, I always felt like that answer was already inside me. All my life I heard about The Friend who had a gift to preach in such a simple way that people heard her and then heard themselves in her.”

  He paused and took a breath and let it ripple slow out of him and said, “Which is how it works, is what I been learning, over and again.” He fell silent and brushed a fly off his hip and watched it rise and swirl and settle upon her thigh and he brushed it away again.

  “Wait,” she said. “That’s it? That’s the story?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “It’s something all right. But I got to know—”

  “What? What do you need to know?”

  “Well. Did she walk on water?”

  He smiled and lifted himself and kissed her, settled back. He looked off toward the low roof again and said, “When she got done preaching there was nothing but silence. Imagine that. A whole thousand or more people, most of them doubters a couple hours before and not a word from any of em. So she just stood and waited. Then, whatever it was broke the spell of her words, maybe a dog barking or a hungry baby squalling, whatever it was she spoke again. She thanked all of them for coming and wished them all to welcome Christ into their hearts. The old man told me it was silent again so much you could hear a watch tick in a man’s pocket a dozen feet away. Like they was all holding their breath against what she might say next, as if most all of em was ashamed of calling her out in such a way. Which was when she spoke once more: She told em she’d welcome them to watch her walk on water. Said she was fearless about that as all other things. And those who required that of her would only have to meet back in that selfsame spot the second Sunday come January and she’d happy oblige them. Then she walked to her chay through the newfound silence and mounted up in and rode off.”

  “You ask me, she reminds me of Amos.”

  “How ever so?”

  “He had that silver tongue. Could convince anyone of anything, leastways until they caught on to him. The few that did.”

  “I see what you’re getting at. But it wasn’t so. I guess you could say The Friend was the direct opposite of him. Never uttered a word, let alone a sentence or even a thought, that wasn’t heartfelt and true. And that’s the way I was raised.”

  She didn’t say a word but pulled her hands behind her head and with her elbows lifted high she cracked her neck.

  He said, “It’s the only way I know how to live.”

  After a time she said, “These last days. You learned any other possible ways?”

  He looked off where the light beat crippled through the chestnut leaves against the log-chinks and threw tattered beams on the faded and dirt-obscured patterns of the rugs. Then he said, “It’s adding much to what I know.”

  She heaved a sigh and her ribcage rode her breasts up and down and she remained silent.

  After a time more he said, “You reckon we should eat that rabbit?”

  She rose out of the bed and stood looking down at him. A jet of air blew through the cabin and her skin prickled and she said, “I’m hungry always. More than I could count. I guess I always been that way. Eating rabbit seems a good idea.”

  Fourteen

  For moments August struggled against the day, hazy gauze upon him, feeling he might press himself back into the dream seemingly yet there, awaiting his return. His wanting to return. She there also waiting, her long limbs, naked body, face and buttocks in the way of dreams both ably and strongly pressed against his own face. Her hair spread about her face, eyes laughing and full mouth meeting his. The rest of her also.

  Then the day upon him, hot and late and he rose from his bed and pulled on clothes, almost trotting on his way downstairs, his urgency now for the work before him and came into the kitchen where she knelt before the hearth making fire, also late to rise and still in her nightgown of summer wash-faded gingham. Stretched down against her back and over her hips, her hair not yet braided and pinned up but flowing down along her bare arms and her own hot, caught-out face turned up to him. He went on roughly, his feet off-kilter, out into the yard and the waiting barns.

  Where he milked and worked his other chores and carried his pails to the cooling well in the buttery and glanced up toward the road where his cousin and his boys would be coming soon and throughout, bits and fleets of the dream came back over him, the ache also in his loins and he stopped finally and looked back at the house where Becca waited breakfast for him, dressed for the day now he was sure. And so paused there in the buttery door, unable to walk those paces to his own roof, his kitchen, and the girl from the dream waiting inside. And it came to him that he’d grown old so young.

  Fifteen

  He woke from a dreamless sleep, the basement already pale-lit with daylight, and he lay on the bunk blinking up at the ceiling, placing himself and then trying to recall when he’d last slept so deeply and untroubled and could not. Some months before the war, so long past he could not place a single one but rather the vague and general sense that such nights had once been his. He stretched and stood. Pushed through the opening at the bottom of the bars was a tin plate of food and a tin cup of coffee; he’d always been awake and pacing often for hours before the meal was brought.

  He knelt and lifted the coffee first. It was still warm and he sipped and wondered if perhaps it had been the jailor entering and leaving that had stirred him from his sleep. The peace that had infused his sleep, that had made possible that sleep, returned and fell over him and he squatted and drank all but an inch of the coffee and for the first time in weeks enjoyed the warmth and vitality spreading through him. He set the remaining coffee on the floor and took up the plate, steadying it with one hand, and took up the fork and ate the two fried eggs with unbroken yolks atop a mound of cornmeal mush, pressing the fork sideways to spill the yolks and cut apart the whites to bits and stirring the cool eggs into the still-warm mush. It was good. Enough so he wished for salt but was grateful all the same. When the food was gone he finished the coffee and placed the cup upon the plate along with the fork and bent to slide them through the opening and walked to the corner and passed water into the slop bucket and then sat on the bunk, facing the cell front, the basement, the stairs. And waited.

  As always when the jailor came down after the plate he came alone. When noon-dinner was delivered t
here were always two of them for it was then that his cell door was opened and his slop bucket exchanged for one intended to be clean—a crusted, foul wooden bucket, some few times sprinkled with a dust of lime and those times the one man held a short double-barrel shotgun while the other man did this job. The first time or so they’d asked Malcolm to bring the full bucket from the corner to the door of the cell so no man would have to enter, but he’d sat on his bunk or as often stood with his back to them at the rear of the cage, staring at the blocks of the basement wall. And so after, he guessed, a consultation with the sheriff, the one man had stood back leveling the gun at such a range that discharging a single round of buckshot would take his head off while the other came and went and never once even in his worst days had he so much as twitched for even then he was intent on his end and they soon enough came to realize he offered no threat but there was no dropping of the vigilance, nor did he expect any. Or care.

  But now he rose from the bunk and walked to where the man was bent, picking up the empty plate and cup.

  “Good morning.”

  The jailor tried to hide his surprise but the tin cup rattled on the plate. He did not respond but stepped back to place distance between them.

  Malcolm said, “When Judge Gordon arrives, would you pass the message that I’d wish to speak with him? I’d be grateful if you would. Or do I have to speak with the sheriff first?”