Light to the Hills: A Novel (64)

For a while, Sass followed Mama around as she fingered bolts of fabric and asked about the prices. Except for the candy, which she knew Mama would not purchase, nothing in the store much interested her, and Sass wandered outside to stroke Plain Jane’s soft nose as the mare dozed in the sunshine, hip cocked to rest a rear hoof. Other horses stood tied farther down the dusty lane, some by the feed store, some outside the saloon (even this early) at the edge of what passed for town. Sass toed the dust and squinted down the road, glancing briefly back inside the dim store at Mama, who had planted herself on a stool at the counter to debate the best stitch to use for a side seam. No telling how long they’d be. They still had to look at shoes for Cricket if he’d ever quit drooling over the tackle.

Sass wandered idly past the storefronts full of things beyond her reach, nodding occasionally to women she passed and stopping to speak to a girl her age she’d seen once before. Her red hair hung in a thick braid down her back, and she wore a blue cotton dress and shoes. The girl swung a book in her hand, and Sass recognized it as one she had actually read.

“How’d you like your book?” she asked.

The girl stopped and regarded Sass in her plain dress and bare feet. “This ’un?”

Sass nodded. “I liked it fair enough, but my favorite is the one about the clock.”

“Oh,” the girl said. Alma Reed. That was her name. She was one of the girls in the schoolroom that day long ago. “You read this one?”

“Reckon so. I like all the Nancy Drew ones,” Sass said. Alma seemed surprised, but she agreed that she liked them, too. When Alma’s mother called to her from the front of the general store, she turned to go but waved at Sass.

“Nice to see you again,” Alma said with a smile.

A warmth spread beneath Sass’s ribs. It was an unfamiliar sensation, but Sass recognized it—pride. Knowing how to read had sparked a new confidence inside her. The feeling lasted until Sass reached the Feed & Seed. The earthy smell of growing things and acrid tang of fertilizer drew her inside. In the back of the store, she stood in front of the square wooden cubbies filled with all manner of grains and seeds. A metal scoop hung from a nail on the wall near a scale that dangled from the ceiling on a pulley chain. Sass had no intention or means of buying such bounty, but she loved the slick feel of sticking her hands in the bins and running the seeds through her fingers like water. There was corn, buckwheat, barley, and sorghum for grains, and in the smaller bins, muskmelon, radishes, turnips, and several types of beans. Buying seed for a vegetable garden was wasteful when you could save and dry your own or trade with neighbors. All the colors and sizes laid out together was dizzying. Imagine the tangle of garden if all those seeds sprouted and grew. Come summer, you could eat all you wanted.

Dreaming about the impossible bounty, Sass paid no mind to the voices at first, but like a clap of thunder wakes you from a sleep of a night, the sound of one particular voice froze her to the spot. She clenched her fists so tight the grain could’ve been milled into flour right inside her sweaty palms.

“I got me a feller to help run the operation, don’t worry ’bout that. You just need to haul it cross the line into Perry and Knott.”

“I might need a’ advance to get the car up to snuff.”

The two men stood just outside the back door. Though she wasn’t all alone in the store—folks shuffled by down the aisles on either side of her—Sass held her breath as the Feed & Seed fell away around her.

“You get any ideers ’bout crossing me, give a thought to that last cave-in. It ain’t nothing to lay a charge if a score needs settled—I done it before. A whole army of knockers can’t save you from that slate ceiling when I set the blast.” He laughed, and the cruel sound of it set Sass’s teeth on edge.

“That how you lost them fingers?” The second man tried to joke through the bluster, but Sass heard the nervous warble in his response. Cave-in? Sass swallowed down the sick that rose in her throat. She pushed away the memory of her and Fern coming back to the house to find Finn lying blackened and battered in the bed. That hadn’t been an accident?

“My fingers ain’t your concern, less they’re pulling the trigger of a barrel aimed your way. We have us a’ understanding?”

Sass clung to the side of the seed bins to keep her knees from buckling straight to the floor. She turned her head toward the front of the Feed & Seed, searched for her mother, remembered she’d come here alone. The back door opened, and a man she didn’t know pushed through, barely glancing at Sass as his boots clomped up the aisle of the wood-planked floor toward the front. Before she could tell her feet to move, the voice’s owner pushed through into the back room. Sass knew in that moment how a small brown rabbit felt, held frozen in a field under a hawk’s gaze. Although her eyes studied the floor and all she saw was the tips of his dirty boots poking out from the edge of his overalls, she knew when the boots didn’t move past the seed bins that he’d seen her.

“Well, if it ain’t my handy-dandy rooster catcher,” he drawled. When Sass didn’t answer, he latched onto her upper arm with his rough hand and dragged her easily out the back door. He pushed Sass up against the wall of the building and stuck his left hand in her face. Shiny red nubs poked out where his first two fingers should’ve been, and Sass’s gaze traced the long red scar that ran down his arm and disappeared into his shirtsleeve.