Light to the Hills: A Novel (57)
Gripp leaned on one elbow and became animated. “The preacher feller, now he was something. I seen him—more’n once—recite some passage from Ezekiel that could staunch blood. Just make a bleeding place on man or beast dry right up, no joke. Beat everything I ever saw.
“This one time I rode with the preacher to another church, trying to get the lay of the land. The feller goes on and on until I thought I might lose my mind with boredom. Can’t even tell you what the subject was.”
“Sounds about right,” she purred.
“I got what I came for in the end. Hooked up with twin brothers with access to a stock car, perfect for making deliveries further off.”
“You were making deals with the devil under God’s own roof,” she observed, shaking her head at his naughtiness. “You got some guts, I’ll say that.”
“That ain’t all I got,” he growled, pulling her close.
After one of these jaunts, when Gripp got back into town, having sown some oats, he happened to pass by an office where he caught sight of a dark-haired woman leading a mule with bulging saddlebags. Beside her walked a small boy, laughing and tossing rocks into the dust. Gripp swore he recognized her, though she had a few years on her since he’d seen her last. She reminded him of Frank Rye’s wife—or rather, his widow—that preacher’s daughter, and he felt a stirring in his trousers.
Could she be the ministering angel Finn had been going on about? The librarian woman? Now, wouldn’t that be a small world? For now, Gripp let it go. He didn’t aim to ruin two good partnerships over the same woman anyhow, not when business was so fine. All the same, he tucked the image of the woman away in his head and noted the direction she rode, in case there was call to get reacquainted somewhere in the future. He figured she probably owed him something for his two lost fingers.
Chapter 18
A ravenous pileated woodpecker was going to town on a nest of carpenter ants embedded in the hickory outside the MacInteer cabin. The huge bird was persistent, Sass granted him that; he was liable to cut the tree right in half with all that hammering. She peered at him from the front door, his plumed red head bobbing quick as a whip. She wished he’d hush his constant ratt-a-tatt-a-tatt so she could concentrate. Now that the weather had broken, spring chores were plentiful, and fitting in time to read of a morning wasn’t easy. Miz Rye had worked some kind of magic: the book woman was friends with the schoolteacher and—imagine!—the teacher had loaned out a particular book Sass had mentioned. Sass finally held in her hands Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock, the book she remembered from her brush with school, but unless the ants gave out in that tree, she wouldn’t be finishing it soon.
Mama had granted Sass an extra few minutes that morning before she had to join her and Fern in the garden. Since Sass had surely shown a knack for picking up words, and since school was so far off and likely out of the question, Mama had appointed Sass to teach the rest of the family. Each morning, Sass copied out a handful of words on small slips of paper and affixed them to objects around the cabin—chair, table, bed, kettle. By the end of each week, without even studying on them extra much, those words settled in their heads by seeing them over and over, just like feet learning the path through the woods to the ginseng patch. Mama told Sass that in the middle of ordinary tasks while her hands were busy kneading dough, mending, or sweeping out the cabin, the letters tossed ’round and ’round in her head like turning over garden soil, and they stuck in her memory. Sass knew the same was true for Finn, Fern, and Cricket because when she quizzed them at supper, they raced to see who could spell or read the word quickest. Even her daddy chimed in, always game for a contest.
Sass finally gave up and shut her book. That Nancy Drew was something else. She lived in a place Sass could hardly imagine, rode in cars, and traveled like it was nothing. She was so smart she could figure out what other regular people couldn’t. Reading her story filled up Sass’s chest with air and a curious lightness. As different as their lives were, she and Nancy were also the same. Nancy cracked open a door inside Sass, one that beckoned her to wonder and stretch.
There was a spot she and Finn used to hike to—they called it Far Knob—that looked from below like little more than a pile of boulders as they climbed to it from the bottom of the slope. It had been too steep even for Finn to carry Sass on his back. They’d each had to grab saplings and brace their feet against stones on their way up to keep from sliding back down the steep ascent. At the top, breathless and their clothes snagged with brambles, they’d clambered onto the knobbed rock face and marveled. The sky opened up in a broad sweep, and as far as they could see, to where the blue sky faded to a haze of gray in the treetops, rounded mountaintops rose and dipped in blues and greens, constantly shifting between sunlight and shade from clouds sailing by overhead. Birds soared up here, big birds that opened their great wings and rode the twisting currents in wide circles in search of prey beneath the trees.
“Look out there, Sassy.” Finn pointed. “Tucked away up here, sometimes I get to thinking we’re all there is, our fishing hole, the weeds in the garden, the coal mine, and Digger and Tuck barking at raccoons all night.” Sass had felt that, too. Their nook of the world was like the small end of a telescope, but turn it around and peek out the big end, and look what all was revealed. Since the book woman had come, the times she and Finn had spent up on Far Knob often nudged at her insides. The books Sass read took her back to standing on the top of those rocks. She started to see her mountain home and her place there as a page in a far bigger story, one that stretched out farther than even the eagles could fly.