Slant of Light Read online

  Blank Slate Press

  Saint Louis, MO 63110

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 Steve Wiegenstein

  All rights reserved.

  For information, contact

  Blank Slate Press at 3963 Flora Place, Saint Louis, MO 63110.

  For information about special discounts or bulk purchases, please contact us at [email protected].

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Set in Adobe Garamond Pro

  Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi & Jane Colvin

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012935148

  ISBN-10: 0982880669

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9828806-6-1

  For My Mother and Father

  Acknowledgment

  I firmly believe that every human being is touched by inspiration—some often, some rarely. But we all have our moments when we have a big idea, a stroke of inspiration, or a moment of insight. Making those ideas reality is where the real struggle begins, and it’s a struggle that cannot be waged alone. It’s not enough to call on the Muse. The Muse has to answer and say, “You have my attention, and I am listening.”

  I have been fortunate throughout my life to have had people around me who have encouraged my bouts of creativity. My mother and father, Faye and Eugene Wiegenstein, supported every crazy idea I came up with as a kid, and the sense of empowerment they gave me went a long way toward making me the person I am today.

  The good people at Blank Slate Press—Kristina Blank Makansi and Jamey Stegmaier, by name—have been extraordinarily helpful in getting this book in shape for publication, with ideas and information, thoughts on character development and plot structure, never settling for the “just okay” but always pushing toward the “just right.” I am grateful for all they have done.

  My wife, Sharon Buzzard, read every word of the manuscript more than once, and her suggestions and comments were always made with a keen literary sense and a belief in the power of storytelling. My gratitude for her contributions to the creation of this book is impossible to express.

  There’s a certain slant of light,

  On winter afternoons,

  That oppresses, like the weight

  Of cathedral tunes.

  […]

  When it comes, the landscape listens,

  Shadows hold their breath;

  When it goes, ‘tis like the distance

  On the look of death.

  ~Emily Dickinson

  Not in Utopia, — subterranean fields, —

  Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

  But in the very world, which is the world

  Of all of us, — the place where in the end

  We find our happiness, or not at all!

  ~ William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 edition)

  August 1857

  Chapter 1

  The keelboat moved so slowly against the current that Turner sometimes wondered if they were moving at all. Keeping a steady rhythm, Pettibone and his son worked the poles on the quarter-sized boat they had built to ply the smaller rivers that fed the Mississippi. Whenever the current picked up, Turner took the spare pole and tried to help, but although he was tall and muscular, with a wide body that didn’t narrow from shoulders to hips, poling a boat wasn’t as simple as it looked. He pushed too soon, too late, missed the bottom, stuck the pole in the mud, all to the amusement of Pettibone’s son, Charley. And with every stroke, Turner asked himself: What in all creation am I doing here?

  “Limb,” Pettibone called. They all ducked.

  Turner had unloaded his cargo at a steamboat landing in Arkansas and come the rest of the way on the keelboat, winding through the tangle of bayous where the rivers met, the countryside flat and swampy, the loops of the river indistinguishable. Pettibone claimed he knew the channel of the St. Francis, so there was nothing to do but trust him.

  Turner wondered now about the steamboat captain’s advice to take a boat up the St. Francis instead of continuing to Cape Girardeau and traveling overland in whatever wagons he could rent or buy. Mosquitoes woke them before dawn and troubled them until the sun’s heat drove them to the shade, then troubled them again as soon as the sun declined. To give more purchase to their poles, they hugged the bank, but that meant fighting through overhanging brush all day. In the center of the boat was a stumpy mast, a four-inch pole draped with a canvas sail, fixed with a series of shaky-looking braces. Pettibone was constantly adjusting it, but most of the time it just hung slack in the hot, wet air. At night they tied up on the few solid-looking humps of land and slept on the boat for fear of snakes, netting draped over their bodies to slow down the mosquitoes. Even then Turner could not sleep well, dreaming of fat water moccasins slithering onto the deck.

  On the eighth day a long low rise appeared before them. “That there’s Crowley’s Ridge,” said Pettibone. “Last piece of Arkansas you’ll see.”

  “Thank God Almighty for that,” Turner replied.

  The ridge sat to their left like a humped cloud bank on the horizon, but the countryside didn’t change. Arkansas on the left, Missouri on the right, it was all the same. Charley, a boy of thirteen, entertained himself by commenting aimlessly on everything he saw—turtles, herons, the stream of his pee into the river—until his father growled for silence.

  The current strengthened as they rounded the ridge, and Turner had to wade ashore with a rope. At first he pulled directly on the boat, but Pettibone showed him how to snub the rope around a tree and keep it tight.

  “Just take up the slack,” he said. “You don’t need to haul us upriver yourself.”

  Turner filed away this information, as he planned to file away every piece of knowledge he gained for the next few years. He had to; this new chapter of his life depended on it. He was no farmer and had thirty years’ worth of experience to catch up on. But surely a man could pick up the tricks with attentiveness and study.

  He didn’t know what he had been born to become, but by God it was not a farmer. He’d seen them every day back in Illinois, clumping into the newspaper office on their trips into town to hear the gossip, to sit around the desk and spit, leaving the editor’s boy—him—to clean up their misses. When he was small, he had disliked these men—their earthy smell, their beards, their ragged clothes. As he grew older, he saw that they were not dirty and ragged by choice, but by necessity, their lives swallowed up by their forty acres of ground, their debts, the prices handed to them by the local merchants and the railroad men. Of course they were ignorant of the larger world. Their world was no bigger than a quarter mile square, and that if they were lucky.

  Even then, Turner knew he was not going to be a village editor like his father, listening with forced politeness to any son-of-a-bitch with a nickel, bowing to the county judges for the privilege of printing their legal notices. And now, if his father were alive, how he would laugh to see him on a keelboat, hauling a pile of tools and seeds into Missouri.

  “Okay, jump on,” Pettibone said. “We’re crossing over.”

  Ahead, the ridge finally came down to meet the river, ending in some low chalk bluffs. A ferryboat was tethered on the Missouri side where a wagon track ended in a ramp of packed dirt.

  The ferryman, thin and toothless, walked out of his shed as they poled by. He was shirtless but wore a battered hat. “Well, Pettibone,” he called. “Come in and set. I got whiskey.”

  Pettibone cast a sideways glance but did not stop poling. “My customer here is in a hurry. I’ll get you on
the way back down.”

  The ferryman touched the brim of his hat to Turner. “You’re welcome inside too, mister.”

  “No thanks. Not even noon yet.”

  “Where you headed?”

  Pettibone interrupted. “Greenville, up by Greenville.” They were almost out of talking range. “Save me some of that old tanglefoot for when I come back.”

  “I will, I will,” the ferryman called out, and turned back to his cabin.

  They poled in silence until they rounded the next bend.

  “I tell you what,” Pettibone said in a low voice. “That old bastard won’t cut your throat for your goods, but he knows people who will.”

  By nightfall they had reached higher ground, and Pettibone’s mood improved. Ahead of them Turner could see the Ozarks rising up in the distant dusk, so low and hazy that they seemed like an illusion, no mountains, hardly even hills from this distance, but surely more than he had grown up with on the Illinois prairie. As they poled toward an angle of bank to tie up for the night, Pettibone, in the bow, suddenly dropped to the deck and motioned for Turner and the boy to be quiet. The boat drifted on, and as they floated to the bank, a deer came into view about fifty yards ahead, drinking.

  Crouched behind the pile of supplies, Pettibone quietly removed a rifle from a box beside him. He tamped the powder and ball, wadded the barrel, and rested it across some sacks of flour. As soon as the deer raised its head, he fired. The gun made a deafening roar and sent a cloud of smoke across the boat, but when it cleared they could see the deer, dead, half in the river and half on the bank. It was a small doe, about eighty pounds.

  Within half an hour they had the deer dressed and hanging from a tree limb. Pettibone set to butchering while Turner and the boy gathered firewood. Soon they had a foreleg over the fire.

  “We’ll cook the rest tomorrow morning and take it with us,” the boatman said. “Get to Greenville, I’ll trade half of it for something. Full bellies tonight, boys.”

  They were waiting for the venison to cook, Pettibone and Charley resting against a log and Turner sitting on an upturned nail keg, when a man on horseback appeared out of the darkness on the other side of the fire. He arrived so quietly, he seemed to materialize out of the air. None of the three even had time to be surprised.

  “I heard a shot,” said the man.

  Pettibone and his son sat stiffly against the log. There was an awkward pause. So Turner jumped to his feet. A quick mind and a firm handshake had gotten him this far.

  “Yes, indeed,” he said. “My friend here had some fine luck. Won’t you join us? We have plenty.”

  The man glanced around the camp. He was tall and thin, with a narrow face and a long, bony nose. “Just you three?”

  “Just us three.” Turner took a step toward him. He was a young man in his twenties, with black hair and an attempt at a beard. From his saddle horn hung a rifle in a homemade canvas scabbard. A rope trailed from his saddle, and in the darkness behind him, Turner could hear the snuffles and snorts of hogs.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said the man. As he dismounted, his topcoat parted, and Turner saw the glint of firelight on the barrel of a revolver stuck in his belt. He guessed by their frozen expressions that Pettibone and Charley had seen it too.

  “James Turner,” he said, extending his hand.

  The man shook it solemnly. “Sam Hildebrand.” He glanced behind him. “I am taking some hogs to my cousin in Bloomfield. Hope you don’t mind a hog.”

  “You are welcome,” Turner said. “Hog, too.”

  They settled by the fire and carved off pieces of venison with a long knife Hildebrand produced from a saddlebag. Turner introduced him to Pettibone and the boy; Pettibone muttered a greeting and shook his hand, while the boy stood mute.

  “You’re a fine shot,” said Hildebrand, eyeing the carcass of the deer.

  “I had a rest,” said Pettibone.

  “You men afoot? I didn’t see no horse pickets.”

  “We’re aboat,” Turner said. “Heading upriver.”

  “The piggies will go after those guts over there, if you don’t mind,” said Hildebrand.

  Sure enough, in a moment three big sows followed by a cascade of piglets came into the clearing and took to the heap of entrails, shoving and squealing over the choicest parts. The sows were tied together with intricate loops of rope that wound around their necks, behind their forelegs, over their backs, and then to the next hog.

  “That’s quite an arrangement,” Turner said.

  “Ain’t that so,” said Hildebrand. “A hog does not like to be interfered with. That biggest one damn near cost me a finger, but I’ll get her back come winter. Fortunately, a hog cannot go backward with any strength, so even a small man can hold them with a rope. If they ever figure out this stratagem and start coming at us, we humans are in trouble.” His voice was soft, with an odd lilt, almost singing his words.

  The sows had finished off the deer guts and settled on the ground to rest, the little ones tugging at their teats. The smallest of the three got up occasionally and snuffed among the leaves for a missed tidbit.

  “Enough of hogs,” Hildebrand said. He rubbed his hands on the grass to clean off the venison juices. “My curiosity is aroused. What brings you gents out here in the middle of creation on a boat?”

  “I’m starting a settlement,” Turner said. “I’ve been granted some land upriver, in Madison County.”

  “Granted? By the state?”

  “No, a gentleman named George Webb.”

  Hildebrand lowered his head and spat thoughtfully between his legs. The meal finished, he plunged his knife into the dirt to clean it. Pettibone and his son had inched their way to the end of the log, their eyes on Hildebrand’s revolver.

  “I know who George Webb is. Good man. Never figured him for a town founder.”

  “It’s not so much a town as a social experiment. I lecture on social reform, and Mr. Webb follows my ideas. All who come to join the community will own it together. All of our earnings will go to a common treasury, and we will decide democratically how to spend them.”

  Another long pause. “Free country, I guess,” Hildebrand finally said. “Well, I better mount up. I can make another six, eight miles before bedding down.” Then he spoke more softly to Turner. “A word with you, sir.”

  They walked to the riverbank, out of earshot. “You can read and write, then,” Hildebrand said.

  “Yes.”

  “Could I trouble you to write a letter for me?”

  “Of course.” They stepped onto the boat, where Turner fetched a pencil and his notebook from his bag. He saw Hildebrand cast an appraising glance over the mountain of goods. Turner sat on a stack of flour sacks and turned his notebook toward the firelight. “Go ahead.”

  Hildebrand paced back and forth in front of him, his voice low. “The address is Mrs. Rebecca Hildebrand, Desloge, Missouri.” He cleared his throat. “Dear Mother, I hope you are well. I will reach cousin’s by morning. The gentleman who is writing this for me will post it in Greenville.” He paused. “You can, can’t you?”

  “My pleasure,” said Turner.

  Hildebrand nodded. “My travels have proceeded successfully and with no incident, although I am developing a dislike for hogs, or I should say one hog in particular. I believe my business may take me into Arkansas, Greene County or perhaps even farther. It may be more than a month before I return. Please give my fondest greeting to Father and brothers and keep a spot warm on the hearth for me. Your loving son, Samuel.”

  He stopped pacing and watched Turner finish the letter. “The art of the pen is something I never acquired,” he said. “I do regret that at times.”

  Back at the fire, Hildebrand shook their hands again. “Best of luck to you on this venture,” he said to Turner, and to Pettibone, “Thanks for the meat.” He twitched the rope on his saddle to get the hogs to their feet.

  “I bet you stole them hogs,” Charley blurted out.

  Hildeb
rand did not appear to move quickly; his motion seemed to Turner casual and deliberate. But it must have been quick, for in one moment he was twitching the rope and in the next moment he had his pistol out of his belt, leveled at Charley’s chest, the hammer back. Turner stood in the sudden silence, his heart thumping.

  Hildebrand held the pistol still. “You are a boy,” he said after a long time, all the lilt gone from his voice. “A boy is likely to forget his manners. And this gentleman has done me a favor, so I will indulge your lack of manners this once.”

  Then as quietly as he had arrived, Hildebrand disappeared into the darkness. Turner, Pettibone, and the boy watched the spot where he had gone.

  “I didn’t—” Charley started to say.

  Pettibone slapped his son across the cheek, hard. The sound echoed across the river. “Load up this meat,” he said. “We are sleeping upstream and across. That fella may decide to come back, and I do not want to be here if he does.” He kicked the chunks into the fire and walked to the boat without saying another word.

  “Yessir,” said Charley, rubbing his cheek.

  They poled across the river by lantern light, feeling their way upstream in the darkness, until Pettibone found a campsite on a sandbar. “No fire tonight,” Pettibone said. “Sorry you can’t write your letter to your wife.”

  Turner squinted at the moon rising through the trees. “There may be enough light.”

  “Suit yourself,” Pettibone said. “We’ll hail Greenville by noon tomorrow and reach your place the next day.”

  Turner braced himself against his rolled-up blanket and angled his body so the moonlight fell on the notebook page. He’d made a practice of writing Charlotte every night since his departure and wasn’t about to stop now.

  My dear Charlotte—

  But what to say? We were very nearly robbed and murdered today, and left on a riverbank for the crows? I have no idea what I am doing? Hardly. He imagined her response to such maunderings—quick, sympathetic, but level-headed. What would you do? Turn around and go back? Charlotte was a darling, but she was no coward, and no fool either. That was what had caught his notice the night they met, her wit and intelligence, the brightness in her eyes as she stepped into the conversation, as sharp as any man, and quick to dispose of any cant with a sweet smile and a firm rejoinder. This is my match, he had thought. This is the woman who can be the stone to my blade, who can keep me sharp and true.