Under a Gilded Moon(112)

Which maybe wasn’t quite fair. But maybe she was allowed a thunderhead of emotions today.

Kerry refused to meet their eyes.

At least Madison Grant didn’t try to show his face here. The knife from her boot had at least had that much effect.

Far in the back corner of the little chapel stood Dearg Tate. Head down.

Kerry took a long breath. Tried to focus up there on the pulpit again.

“Because Johnny MacGregor,” the minister was saying, “was a man whose conduct might not have been perfect every day of his life.”

Rema lowered her voice only slightly to mutter, “Well, if that ain’t a clatterment of understatement.”

“But whose path, thanks be to God, finally brought him the wisdom to ask forgiveness. The courage to change. The grace to come home.”

Kerry tried to swallow down the shout that rose in her throat, the protest that this man had changed too late to calm all the chaos he’d caused. Too late to bring her momma back from the broken-down dead.

Kerry knew she’d be able to recall the funeral’s words later, be able to replay it like a wax phonograph recording. But right now she was only numb.

Her head swung back toward the pews of singing congregants. Some of them openly weeping. Not for Johnny Mac, Kerry suspected, so much as the strange and disturbing injustice of grace.

The minister stepped aside as the harmonies branched and the notes swelled.

There’s a land that is fairer than day,

And by faith we can see it afar . . .

The service easing to a close, the people rose, stiff, from their pews to belt out the final lines.

And our spirits shall sorrow no more . . .

We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

Then it was over. The Bratchetts both hugged her and moved on to let the other mourners press forward.

Kerry and Rema and the twins stood near the pine casket to shake hands. On top of the casket, they’d propped the photograph of her father and Robert Bratchett, their young faces beaming at the camera, their Union uniforms pressed and spotless, buttons gleaming. Beside that sat the one surviving likeness of Missy Murray MacGregor, the sketch that Johnny Mac must have done, her trusting and hopeful and smiling with her eggs and her chickens and rooster.

“A real fine likeness,” Rema pronounced it. “She always was a pretty thing.”

“A rooster,” said Kerry.

Rema looked at her like she’d gone stark raving mad, driven by grief. “What?” She looked at the sketch again. “Well now, I reckon there would sure enough be a rooster there.” She looked back at Kerry and patted her hand. “A real fine likeness of the bird, too, honey.”

But Kerry’s mind had shot to another rooster, this one on the crest in Farnsworth’s telegraph office—not just any fowl with a comb but a Gallic rooster, a symbol of France—and, in this case, the kind of France that Ligue Nationale and others envisioned: one without Jews or immigrants or anyone who wasn’t white.

It had been Farnsworth’s name imprinted on Madison Grant’s stack of stationery—him that Grant had been writing. Farnsworth was one of the many in town, no doubt, infected by Grant’s views.

What if it was Farnsworth, after all?

Not as the killer, as she’d thought at one point, but as the one who’d provided the cover. It was Farnsworth whose receipt of Dearg’s telegram to her from Whitnel, and whose testimony to the police that he, along with Jackson and others, had seen him come in on the train the day after the attack, stood as proof that Dearg couldn’t have been behind the killing. But Dearg could have walked miles back down the line to Black Mountain or Round Top to catch a train there and make a public appearance the next day at Biltmore Junction. Only Farnsworth, though, could have transcribed a cable from Whitnel that had never been sent. And Sheriff Wolfe, distracted by so many other suspects and thrown off the scent, might never have checked with the other ticket offices.

What if Dearg had been driven for some reason by someone to attack the reporter, then handed his alibi by Farnsworth in the form of a fabricated telegram. And a testimonial that was a lie.

Kerry grabbed for her father’s casket to steady herself.

“Tate,” her father had rasped with a kind of panic. Maybe just a reliving of an old memory—or maybe, in his few moments of conscious thought, an instinct that the frustrated, despairing son of the older night-riding Tate might have also given vent to resentment.

Kerry stood gripping the casket and did not want to look for his face.

A few of the mourners nodded to her, a way of saying they were trying to shoulder the sorrow alongside her.

But one set of eyes far at the back met hers, then shot quickly away.

One set of eyes told her they were afraid of what she might see there.

“I don’t,” she said aloud.

“What, honey?” asked Rema.

“I don’t want to know,” Kerry said, speaking to Dearg at the back of the room.

But it was too late. It had all snapped together, as if the memory pictures she’d seen before had been only dots of paint on a larger canvas, like Miss Hopson’s favorite painter, Seurat. With one final, pained look back at her, Dearg Tate ducked out the back of the chapel.

Her father’s casket open at the front of the little chapel, the music flowing around and over and under her, Kerry felt the scene finally take shape. And she could not breathe.