Under a Gilded Moon(109)

He turned, startled, to her. Several lines of the old song went by.

Oh for the wonderful love he has promised,

Promised for you and for me . . .

He raised an eyebrow.

Stepping toward the barn doors, Bratchett ran the back of his right arm across his forehead. Then dipped his head close to hers. “We both volunteered for the army, the Union army.”

Though we have sinned he has mercy and pardon . . .

“Plenty of mountain boys didn’t—for either side. Didn’t feel much connected to the federal government up North or to a bunch of slaveholders hadn’t ever so much as gotten a fingernail dirty. But your daddy and me, we volunteered. Got assigned to the same unit. Made it through, both of us, to come on back home.”

Kerry braced herself against a barn door for support.

“It was after the War things got stirred up. Packs of men, mostly come back from the Confederate Army, went riding at night. Terrorizing.”

Kerry gripped the door’s rope handle, the music from behind them swelling, Bratchett’s words floating somewhere on top. “And my daddy?”

“Your daddy wasn’t of them that went out night riding, no. Him and me were still friends. Our wives, too.”

Holding her breath, she waited for whatever was coming.

“But one night the riders come to him first, trying to bring him along to my place. He wouldn’t go.”

Bratchett’s good arm passed over his forehead and eyes again. Kerry could see he wanted to stop. Let the old song have the final say. But she would not let him look away.

“Your daddy didn’t ride with them, but he didn’t try and stop them, either. Told me later the bunch was drunk and bored, bruising for somebody to bully. Long and short of it, he was scared. They left your farm, come to my place. I fought them back, best as I could. Just me, maybe seven of them.”

Kerry’s eyes dropped to his arm.

“Only good news was Ella’d stayed overnight with a cousin in Black Mountain. No idea what they’d done to her if she’d been there. I’d have had to kill one or two, and they’d have strung me up, sure. As it was, they set the cabin on fire. Left me for dead.”

“On fire,” Kerry repeated.

“Clear to the ground. Your daddy felt bad. Bad enough to help me rebuild—a good three arms between us.” He smiled sadly. “Thought he maybe could have stopped them.”

Robert Bratchett looked her in the eye. “He was probably right. They might’ve been worked up enough to throw some punches his way, but they likely would’ve listened to him. People respected your daddy back then.”

Kerry heard the back then and knew it wasn’t a barb. Just simply true. For most of her life, he’d been known all through this hollow as just a drunk. Who could fiddle the stars into falling.

“The crime your daddy laid at his own doorstop was maybe he could’ve said something. Maybe could’ve stopped Tate.”

Kerry’s mouth opened. But she was slow pulling out sound. “Tate?”

“Dearg’s daddy. Their ringleader back then. That pack always looking for who to hate next. Seemed like the poorer they got, the more land or jobs or women they lost, the more they went looking for trouble.”

“Tate,” she repeated, seeing Johnny Mac’s eyes again, round with terror back in the cabin when he’d asked about the attack at the train station. But no Tate could be connected with that—Dearg’s father long dead and Dearg not even in town.

“Kerry, your daddy had his demons, I know—and a temper like hell. But I’ve wondered if part of what made him rage so loud was the guilt—of back when he’d kept too quiet.”

A hemlock shuddered, its limbs slapping the barn, as the wind blew. Side by side, the two of them stood in silence.

Then Bratchett walked back toward the stall and the man lying there, his breaths just a faint rattle now. As Kerry watched, Robert Bratchett reached down and held Johnny Mac’s hand. From under the bed, Romeo moaned.

She followed Bratchett back into the barn, letting the strains from the fiddle and the singing bow and the twins’ voices flow past her like the brook past the corner of the old chapel.

Ye who are weary, come home . . .

It wasn’t that she believed just now the words they were singing. But there was comfort in standing nearby to listen. To feel the music swirl around her and hold her. While the fissures inside her widened and her tears came streaming at last. And the part that had been hardened against her father for years broke fully open now—not in forgiveness, not yet, but in raw, unguarded sorrow.





Chapter 53

Nico was all that mattered now.

Sal tensed, listening to the rhythm of hoof beats on the Approach Road’s macadam. Peering from behind the screen of rhododendrons, he watched a rider approach. But this was a slim man and well dressed, on a horse that held its tail high and its neck arched: Arab blood, Sal could tell even from this distance. Definitely not Leblanc and his rented dun.

George Vanderbilt cantered past. His head shifted right and then left as if searching for something.

Avoiding the shafts of morning sunlight, Sal moved swiftly through the forest. He would come only close enough to Biltmore House to get his bearings for the direction Kerry MacGregor headed when she walked back to her farm. That might at least put Sal in the general vicinity of the Bratchett farm—where Nico would still be staring blankly out at the world.