This Old World Read online

  This

  Old

  World

  STEVE WIEGENSTEIN

  Blank Slate Press | Saint Louis, MO

  Blank Slate Press

  Saint Louis, MO 63110

  Copyright © 2014 Steve Wiegenstein

  Book 2 of the Daybreak Series

  All rights reserved.

  For information, contact

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

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cover Graphics: Shutterstock, iStock (Getty Images)

  Set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Americanus Pro

  Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9858086-3-1

  For Sharon and Anna

  This old world is full of sorrow,

  Full of sickness, weak and sore.

  If you love your neighbor truly,

  Love will come to you the more.

  We’re all children of one father,

  We’re all brothers and sisters too.

  If you cherish one another

  Love and pity will come to you.

  American Folk Hymn

  Chapter I

  Charlotte Turner stood beneath a redbud tree and watched the last six chickens of Daybreak scratch for morsels among the henbit carpeting the cemetery. They’d been kept in a coop for all the years of the war, far enough into the woods that the sound of their clucking couldn’t be heard by a passing raider, then brought down to scratch whenever the weather allowed. Any sign of trouble and she could shoo them into the forest within moments.

  A wren sang overhead. Charlotte loved the sound of a wren in the morning, a bird she had heard since childhood but never known by name until she came out to Daybreak and began accumulating knowledge of the world. Life in the forest had taught her much—plants that heal, plants that harm, songs and calls and what they meant. It troubled her that more knowledge was out there to be learned, knowledge she hadn’t mastered, plans unfulfilled, projects uncompleted, good things undone. But the war had come, and those plans and projects scattered like straw in the wind.

  She shook off the thought. Life before the war was a dim memory. Almost like a child’s tale, the memory of a group of settlers coming to this remote Ozarks river valley to create a community of equality and sharing, like the Brook Farm and New Harmony communities that had gone before them, only this time they would make a go of it. But now they had been four years struggling for survival since the war had begun in earnest and the Federals had ordered all able-bodied men from the valley. Hens without roosters, scratching for whatever nourishment they could find beneath the leaf litter. Four years of growing food, hiding it, parceling it out to the children, retreating to Harp Webb’s old saltpeter cave whenever there was news of raiders in the area. Four years of escape plans and fear. When Price brought his army up from Arkansas last fall, trying to take St. Louis in some sort of desperation move, Charlotte had never been more glad they lived miles from the main road. As the Federals retreated, they burned towns and farms, and the advancing rebels had gobbled up what remnants they could find. From Pocahontas north to Fredericktown was a swath of burned ground and hunger.

  From where she sat she could see sprouts encroaching into the northern fields, the ones last cleared from forest. Someone needed to cut those sprouts or else that field would be lost within the year. But who? Emile Mercadier could try, but at his age it would take him half a day to cut one sprout. Newton was nine, old enough to work, and he did his best. But they needed him for planting and hoeing the vegetables. If that crop didn’t get planted and tended properly, there would be worse awaiting them than the loss of a newly cleared field.

  No wonder she spent time in the cemetery. They would all be in the ground soon enough. Her sister Caroline, dead in childbirth out in Kansas. Her mother soon after. Caroline’s husband, lost at Chickamauga, now a part of the earth in some lonely Tennessee hollow. Her father in the soil of Virginia. Hard enough to learn of his death, harder still to know he would lie forever in a rebel state. Adam, here beneath her feet, along with all the others from the early years of the settlement who had coughed or bled or suffered their way into the arms of the earth. And James, where was James? Charlotte recalled the day he had walked out toward town to enlist, not taking a horse for fear it would be confiscated, leaving her behind with a child in hand and another in the womb. She had approved of the enlistment then, encouraged it even, what with Sam Hildebrand roaming the countryside and carrying a grudge for the part they had taken in the fight that had taken eight of his men. Better to face a visible enemy in the daylight than to live in permanent fear of Hildebrand’s rifle from the forest. But the years had been so long. She hadn’t heard from him in nearly a month. Had he found his own bitter mouthful of dirt?

  Dark thoughts, dark thoughts. Charlotte closed her eyes. The more she reflected, the more she saw a trail of incompletion all along her path, from childhood forward—the piano lessons abandoned, the reading list never finished, and Daybreak itself, ragged and half-empty, although she had to give some credit for that to the Federal troops and the guerrillas. Perhaps, though, they had only accelerated the inevitable.

  She opened her eyes and stood. This was not the time to moon about lost opportunities. She needed to chase the chickens into their homemade cages, plant lettuce and radishes, sweep the woods for lamb’s quarter and dock, pull an onion from its hiding place and get it clean for tonight’s soup. She needed to endure another day.

  At the ford where the road to Fredericktown crossed the river, a man with a pack on his back and a walking stick in his hand waded through the water. Charlotte smoothed her skirts and squinted into the distance. This was the first traveler they had seen in days. The occasional military patrol, old folks in wagons, sometimes a refugee family—but a man alone and on foot? Charlotte watched as he reached the near bank. He sat in the road and took off his boots, dumped out the water, and resumed his walk. When he came to the fork, he stopped.

  He was wearing a blue kepi and what looked like a Union soldier’s coat, but that meant nothing. The rebels and bushwhackers wore them, too. But on foot like that, he had to be a Union man. No one else would be so foolish as to walk though this part of the world alone.

  The man had a black beard and from this distance what appeared to be black hair streaming out from under his cap. He still stood at the fork in the road, either thinking or waiting for someone to come out. Charlotte decided it might as well be her. She chased the chickens into their pen and headed down the hill.

  She passed behind the Temple of Community, its broken windows still boarded over from the fight four years ago. Who could afford glass these days? And the weekly meetings had faded into memory, with the men all gone. When something needed deciding, they just met in someone’s house or in the cleared ground in front of the Temple. The four houses closest to the river, the ones most prone to flooding, were empty now. They used them for storage, as if there was anything valuable to store.

  Perhaps this man had come to her with news of James. Perhaps this was the moment she had been dreading, when she heard of his death, in battle, or by disease, or amputation, or one of the thousand ills that can befall a man, the moment when she would have to stand and hear some claptrap about the sorrowing heart of a grateful nation.

  No. That alw
ays came by letter, if you were lucky enough not to have read the name in the newspaper beforehand.

  She stopped in the road about six feet in front of the man. She could smell him from where she stood. His overcoat was stained, more dirt brown than blue, and he had a Springfield rifle slung over his shoulder with a piece of rope.

  They regarded each other.

  “Lee’s surrendered,” the man said.

  “It’s about time,” said Charlotte.

  She waited. But the man seemed to be in no hurry to announce his business.

  “We can’t feed you,” she said after a minute.

  “Didn’t ask.”

  “So you didn’t. But you’d not turn down a meal if offered, I wager.”

  “No, ma’am. That’s the soldier’s first rule.”

  “What’s your regiment?”

  “Eighth Missouri.”

  She should have known by the thick Irish accent.

  “I mustered out clean,” he said. “I can show you the paper if you like.”

  He gestured toward his knapsack, but she waved him off impatiently. She could feel the eyes of everyone in Daybreak on her. She wasn’t sure how it had come to be her job to size up every potential threat, but somehow it had. If he had not come to beg a meal, what had he come for?

  “You have a woman among you, a woman named Kathleen Flanagan,” the man said.

  He said it more as a statement than a question. Charlotte narrowed her eyes, suspicious. She remained silent.

  “She was keeping my child for me,” the man went on. “My name is Flynn. The child’s name would be Angus.”

  So that was it. Charlotte looked up at the sky.

  “You’d better come on in, then,” she said at last. “Your son is here.”

  She led the way into the village. This was not going to be easy. Everyone had gotten accustomed to the idea that little Angus’s father was gone, never to return, moldering in some field somewhere or simply off to start a new life now that his wife was dead. Marie Mercadier had been caring for the child for three years now, nearly four.

  “So you know,” she said over her shoulder, “Mrs. Flanagan’s not Mrs. Flanagan any more. She’s Mrs. Mercadier now.”

  “A woman her age,” Flynn said.

  “She can be old and still crave happiness.”

  Charlotte glanced over her shoulder, but Flynn gave no sign of what he was thinking. She stopped and faced him before they reached the first houses.

  “You have heard about your wife?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Got the letter in Tennessee. Not much to do about it by then. Might as well keep fighting. I would have come home when my three years ran out, but we were in Carolina by then, with all the tracks tore up behind us. Had to fight our way north.”

  She turned to face him again. “We all have our stories about the bad things that happened to us in the war. Not to play you down any, but just to tell you.”

  “Oh, I get your point,” he said.

  “My name is Turner, by the way. Charlotte Turner.”

  “Husband out fighting?” He read her expression. “How long since you’ve heard from him?”

  “Not quite a month. A month almost.”

  He nodded. “That will happen, ma’am. You get to fighting, and days will go by. You shouldn’t put nothing to it.”

  “Oh, I don’t.” She left it at that. She did not want to tell this stranger the feeling she had, the feeling she believed in as much as she believed in her own self, that if Turner were to die, out on the field or in some back-line hospital, she would know it that minute. She would feel the shock, no matter the distance or the time. And she had not felt that shock. Therefore he was still alive, somewhere, and heading her way.

  It occurred to Charlotte that she was becoming a creature of signs and omens. Perhaps it was the hunger. She hoped she had not changed so much as to be unrecognizable when James came home, like some she had seen—crabbed, clenched women who never met someone’s eyes, whose instinct to protect and conserve had crossed over into some kind of madness. A woman in French Mills had died that way last year, growing suspicious and inward, hoarding food, and hiding from everyone, even her neighbors, until the silence and darkness of her house led those same neighbors to push down her door and find her dead in bed, starved, with bins full of food in her kitchen.

  They had reached the pump in front of the Temple of Community. Charlotte stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said to the man. “I didn’t mean to be so unfriendly. It’s not very Christian of me.”

  “You’re entitled,” Flynn said. “I’m a stranger. Don’t know as I could tell you who’s Christian and who’s not these days.”

  As they stood, people emerged from their houses and came out to see the stranger, confident now that Charlotte’s presence had marked him as harmless, if perhaps not friendly.

  The former Kathleen Flanagan, who had returned from St. Louis early last year and married Emile Mercadier, stepped out of the group and came close. “Michael Flynn?” she said.

  “The same.”

  “Lord have mercy,” she said. “You’ve come back.”

  “I’m on my way, anyway,” Flynn said. “Still another couple of days to go.”

  “Good Lord, son, we haven’t heard anything from our old settlement in three years. You won’t find nothing down there.”

  “I’m going anyway. That’s our land. Where’s the boy?”

  Kathleen’s face became blank. “He’s well. You needn’t worry about him.” Flynn’s gaze darted around the circle of townsfolk. “He’s not here,” she added.

  “Bring him, then. I can make a dozen miles or more today.”

  Kathleen stepped closer to Flynn. “I have wiped your nose with my apron too many times to be talked to like that,” she said. “Now you listen to me. You are that boy’s pappy, and his mama is gone, God rest her. But before you just show up from nowhere and claim the child, you need to think. Can you feed him? Can you dress him? To be honest about it, son, you’d frighten the boy. What you need right now is a meal and a bath.”

  Flynn’s face clouded with anger, but he held his tongue. “I’d have you bring me my son,” he said after a moment.

  “And I’d have you take a bath, and a meal, and then talk sense with us.” Kathleen turned to two girls hiding behind the skirts of Frances Wickman, their mother. “Sarah, Penelope, go fetch water from the well and put it in the kettle at my house. This gentleman will want plenty of hot water.”

  Penelope muttered something under her breath, but had the sense not to say it aloud. The girls darted off.

  “So this is what happens when we leave the women behind,” Flynn said. “They take over.”

  “Something of the sort,” Charlotte said.

  “Well, ain’t you pert,” said Flynn.

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  But Flynn followed Kathleen to her house, where the girls had been filling the kettle, hung on a tripod over a firepit out back. Some of the townspeople followed, while others returned to their homes. Kathleen placed some kindling on the smoking coals and blew them back into flame.

  “You go on inside,” she said. “There’s a washtub on the floor.”

  Flynn walked toward the door but stopped and turned. “I almost forgot to say,” he said. “The war’s over.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Kathleen said. She turned back to the fire as the children ran off, squealing, with the news. She watched them leave. “I hope you’re telling us the truth.”

  “Oh, I am,” he said. “Couldn’t believe it myself at first.”

  “Help me with this, Charlotte,” Kathleen said. They took sides and lifted the hot kettle off the flames, shielding their hands with rags. As they carried it into the house, more townspeople came running to hear the news. “Let him have his bath, and then we’ll hear all about it,” Kathleen told them. She shut the door behind them, and together she and Charlotte poured the hot water into
the washtub.

  “We’ll step outside now. You take your time,” Kathleen said.

  By now, the news had passed through the village and people were running to the Mercadiers’ house. Emile Mercadier had been in the barn, mending tack, and hobbled in as fast as his arthritic legs would allow, a hole punch still in his hand. “What this man says, is it true?”

  “I expect so,” said his wife. “I knew him before the war, down at our colony in the wilderness. He was not a liar. A Black Irish hothead, but not a liar. I doubt if he has changed much since then. You might find him some clean clothes.”

  Charlotte and Kathleen walked up the dirt lane that ran through the center of the village. They did not speak, but both knew where they were headed: the Temple of Community, where Marie Mercadier had tried to keep some trace of civilization going for the last few years by holding school for the village children.

  They found her there, the room empty, benches overturned as children in their haste had dashed from the building at the news of the war’s end. She was wiping off slates with a damp rag.

  “Angus’s daddy has come back,” Kathleen said, but from Marie’s look it was clear she had already heard.

  “I’ve cared for that boy going on four years now,” she said, not looking up. “I nursed him at my own breast.”

  “I know, honey,” said the older woman. “It ain’t fair, and I know it.”

  “Now I hear he wants to take him down in the wilderness, where your settlement used to be. Nothing’s there, and you know it.”

  “We’ll talk to him. I have known this man Flynn since he was a pup.”

  “Can’t take a five-year-old boy into the woods like that. Does he think he’s still in the Army?”

  “I know, honey,” Kathleen said again.

  “Do not try to soothe me!” Marie snapped. “I am not a child, to be cooed to and soothed. I have brought up this child. He is mine in every way but blood.”

  That was when Charlotte spoke up. “I know, Marie. But the law is on his side, even though he is a stranger to us, and to Angus as well. Perhaps he’ll listen to reason in time. Where is the boy?”