Under a Gilded Moon(24)

Tully and Jursey huddled close by the fire, eating their biscuits and pork. Kerry spooned apple butter on both of their plates, and they beamed.

“I’ll say this for Daddy’s being sick,” Jursey said.

Kerry braced herself. She’d tried to shield her brother and sister from the worst lightning strikes of his rages. But she couldn’t know how much they recalled of the worse squalls.

“We finally got enough plates,” he pronounced, “for all us to eat at the same time.”

Tully and Kerry exchanged glances. Their brother was right, technically: down to three people, and only ever three plates. It was typical of Jursey: being able to ignore the wild boars of sickness and death and fear of the future there in the room and focus only on the thin gladness of enough plates.

Now there, thought Kerry, is a gift.

As the twins ate, she rose to attend to their father, whose eyes had fluttered open. Never once meeting his gaze, she changed his soiled bedclothes. Propped him up to feed him what pieces of biscuits and apple butter he would eat. Held a tin cup of sweet milk to his mouth for him to swallow.

“Kerry,” he rasped.

“Anything you need?” She kept her tone matter-of-fact.

“I want . . . ,” he managed. One of the slurry of words that followed might have been sorry.

Repulsed, she kept up her bustling.

Kerry called Jursey over to help their father use the chamber pot. Their momma had molded it from Carolina red clay, then painted it with dyes from wildflowers—bloodroot and coreopsis and sunflower—and fired it in a small kiln she’d constructed behind the barn.

How symbolic of what happened to Momma, Kerry thought with a rush of bitterness that left her queasy.

By the time they finished lifting his hips onto the chamber pot, Johnny Mac was too exhausted to do anything but sink back and close his eyes.

Just as well, Kerry thought. I’d rather not see your eyes. All that sorry-so-sorry behind them, too late.

At last she perched near the old fiddle to eat a biscuit herself.

“Who,” Tully demanded suddenly, “really did the bad thing down to the station?” She pressed her lips tight, as if the word murder was forcing itself to her tongue.

Jursey mopped his biscuit through apple butter. “Likely still caviling over whether it was our Mr. Bergamini to blame. But it wasn’t.”

Tully was studying Kerry. “How come your face done gone all pinched up like a dried turnip just now?”

“Face went,” Kerry corrected.

“You’re bound to have noticed more’n other folks missed. Who swung the rail dog, you reckon? And why?”

“Could be someone they aren’t even thinking about yet.”

Tully frowned. “Some folks in the crowd, they vowed and declared Mr. Bratchett was likely to blame. Said colored men are like to get angry too easy and—”

“Tully MacGregor. The Bratchetts have been our neighbors from way back. Always kind, ready to help. You ignore that sort of talk, hear me? It’s ignorant and mean, and I won’t have any sister of mine repeat it.”

Tully flinched at the slap of Kerry’s tone. But Jursey only sopped up the rest of the milk in his cup with his biscuit.

Kerry scrubbed at the cast-iron griddle. “I’ve got to spend the day down to Asheville looking for work. With the crops not much tended all summer, I need to find a cash-paying job. Let you two do what trapping and gathering y’all can during the day while I’m gone, then I’ll work alongside you as soon as I get back in the evenings.”

Jursey jumped to his feet. “The chestnut grove’s ankle deep with what’s already felled.”

“Fallen.”

“Yep. We’ll gather so much it’ll make your head spin clear around.”



Kerry and the twins spent the morning storing the last of the corn and turnips in the root cellar and bracing the roof with boards they broke out from the walls of the smokehouse.

Kerry tried to make a joke of it. “No point in protecting the smokehouse like it was some kind of sacred. Nothing left hanging for wolves to get to.”

Tully and Jursey blinked at her sadly, like double vision of the same face.

Preparing for town, Kerry smoothed her hair into a loose braid slung to one side—no point in attempting the Gibson Girl styles she and her friends had worn in New York. It was far too humid here in the mountains, and the work was far too physically taxing for hair that had been twirled and puffed and pinned.

She smoothed her skirt, made of simple blue serge, and the white blouse handed down from her Barnard roommate when the styles had swelled toward more mutton-leg sleeves. It might not be satin, and it was not trimmed in Brussels lace, but it wasn’t covered in roofing shingles and moss, which made it the best choice today.

After pouring ginger root tea with honey into her father’s mouth, she slathered beeswax across his chapped lips. But with more businesslike efficiency than tenderness.

“Killed,” he wheezed with effort. “Somebody . . . killed . . . station.”

Questions in his eyes. Jursey might have told him pieces of news while she was out banging boards off the smokehouse this morning. For a man so close to an end himself, his desperation to know more about the attack seemed odd.

“I’m walking to town to look for a job,” she told him. “The twins’ll be back in a short while if you need anything. I’ll likely be back around nightfall.”