Light to the Hills: A Novel (9)
Mama leaned over her husband and shook his shoulder. “Harley,” she whispered. “Time to rise.” His eyes opened and focused on her face.
“Ayup. Them five miles to the mine ain’t gonna get no shorter.” He sat up and coughed. Turned around and patted Finn on the leg.
“I’ve got your dinner pails by the door. And don’t forget Sass’s bag of sang for the store.”
Sass’s head popped up from the book at the sound of her name. She smiled. “Find some big diamonds, Daddy.”
This was their joke. Nothing but lines of coal streaked the mine walls down deep in the mountains, but Sass had heard them talk about mining for black diamonds when she was younger, and she’d thought they meant for real. Since then, they pretended to count up the diamonds they found on each shift and imagine what they would buy with them when they traded them in. Sass thought they should save for one of the red tractors with a crank handle on the front. She’d seen one in town once, perched on a trailer slated for some other place, another family. It would make plowing and cutting hay go a sight quicker. Finn wanted a fishing pole with a reel and something called a telescope that let you look far off into the sky and study the stars. Cricket and Fern just imagined food, tables of gravy, biscuits, and pork chops, with bread pudding and sweet cake for dessert. Harley voted for a full pantry, a new dress for Rai, and a blood bay horse at least seventeen hands high. As long as they were imagining, why not shoot for the moon?
Cricket sprang up and skipped over to where Finn sat on the bed, pulling on his socks. He held his hand out, palm up, and Cricket deposited a lump of wood, which Finn studied, his brows knitted together.
“Nice job,” he said, handing it back. “Next you gotta figure how to make some legs. Crickets got six legs. You gotta make it in your head ’fore you make it in your hands.” He thought a minute. “How ’bout using some old chicken wire from the coop? Bend it like legs.”
Cricket turned his creation over, nodding. From the way he scrunched his face, he pictured what Finn meant and knew just where to get the wire. He shifted from his left to right foot and grinned at his brother. The wood disappeared into his pocket, and he plopped onto a floor pallet near the hearth. The girls had promised to tell him the rabbit story once they’d puzzled it out.
“Night, Finn,” Sass whispered to her brother, mindful of Hiccup breathing heavily on the pallet. “Night, Daddy.”
Harley nodded to her as he slipped out the cabin door. The tin dinner pails clanked on the porch as he settled them to pull on his boots. Finn smiled at Sass as he followed his father out.
Sass jumped up and caught Finn by the sleeve before he was not quite out the door. “Sunflowers tonight, Finn,” she told him. “A whole acre of ’em.”
He winked at her as he let the door close behind him. Since he’d gone to work in the mines, she’d think of the happiest, airiest places she could imagine, someplace filled with sunlight and color, and as she fell asleep, she’d let her mind settle on that picture. If she could bear down and think hard enough, wish it for him strong enough, maybe the image would will itself into Finn’s head, too, while he worked in the dark.
Sass opened her palm and stared at the sweaty paper triangle in her hand. The sweet apple pie had begun to sour in her stomach. Pie or no pie, she was beginning to wish she’d never met Miz Amanda Rye on her big gray mule. It would be hard to concentrate on sunflowers when all that danced through Sass’s head were rabbits made of velvet.
Chapter 3
At the end of a day’s route, Amanda arrived home spent, weary from the ride, the weather, and the images of the poor families that met her at the doorway of each cabin in the hills. Junebug expertly picked his way through the creek beds that served as roads between communities, and he took his job seriously, minding to lift his feet over loose rock so as not to stumble and toss his rider. Amanda shared the mule’s diligence, determined to do her best to earn a living for herself and her boy.
By the time she paid for corn for Junebug, small tokens of groceries for those she visited, and necessities for herself and her dear friend and roommate, Mooney, who looked after their children while she was away, not much remained to save for the future. It’d been seven years since the crash on Wall Street, but despite FDR’s efforts, the country’s Great Depression slogged on in a steady march. Amanda felt a good deal older than her twenty-one years.
Amanda slipped the saddlebags from the mule’s back and left them in a heap on the porch. She led the mule behind the cabin to the picket line, where she gave him a firm pat on the neck and tied him with a snug knot. Loosening his saddle, she slid it off onto the crook of her left arm and, with a smooth motion, pulled the bridle off over his ears with her right hand.
“Night, buddy. Tomorrow’s a day off. I’ll come give you a good brushing in the morning.”
In response, the mule lowered his big head and rubbed it against her, up and down, almost knocking her off-balance. Amanda laughed and pushed him away with an elbow. “Enough of that. I’ll be covered in mule hair.” From her pocket, she pulled a bruised quarter of an apple and offered it to him on her flattened palm, smiling as his nimble lips plucked it up, a reward for bearing her steadily in the rain.
She set the tack on the porch, collected her saddlebags, and opened the front door of the cabin. One long creak of the door’s hinges announced her entrance, and Mooney’s round face peeped from behind the corner of the stove, where she knelt feeding kindling into the door on its front.