Under a Gilded Moon(36)

A slight man, Schenck watched the tensions among his crew members, nervously twirling his mustache at one end. “Well, then. We do not allow belligerence on this crew.”

Vell, then. Vee do not allow . . .

As Sal fell in beside Bratchett, Tate glowered in their direction.

But the darker-skinned man beside Sal was occupied pounding the head of his pickax back securely on its shaft. If he saw the glower, he ignored it.



At midday, the sun filtering through the last of the birches that still held their leaves, the older man with the brindled beard plucked his lunch pail from the stream. After rummaging in his pail for what looked to Sal like a ball of brown cornmeal, the man popped the whole thing in his mouth.

“Hushpuppy,” he told Sal through a full mouth.

Sal had seen the poverty of the people here in these mountains—much like back in Palermo. He glanced wide-eyed at Bratchett. “Puppies? These are the . . . ?”

Bratchett chuckled. “Ingredients don’t call for actual dog.”

With no lunch and all his money gone to the boardinghouse in the village where Nico was now, Sal lay back to watch the hemlocks bob, green among red maples. Bratchett nudged him. “Can’t eat the rest of my trout. My wife, Ella, batters a mean one.”

With all the conviction he could muster, Sal shook his head. “I am not hungry.” And then more honestly: “I could not take the food from you.”

“Ella don’t take kindly to me wasting her cooking.”

Bratchett was acting out of pity—that much was clear. But Sal was ravenous.

“I thank you. Grazie.” He devoured the trout in four bites, embarrassed at how poorly he’d disguised his hunger. At least there’d be pay coming. And maybe ways to pay Bratchett back.

Sal scooped water out of the stream with cupped hands. The water, icy cold, tasted sweet, as if the buttercups of summer had leaked into it.

“Deeper still holes for each one,” Schenck said as he rode past. His accent became more pronounced when he was on horseback, as if pronouncing his English and controlling a horse taxed the same part of his brain. “And remember: not in a line.”

Jumping into the hole he was digging, Sal launched a pickax over his head to break up the stone. The soil of Sicily, too, had been full of rock—volcanic rock. The vintners who owned the tiered land rising in the hills above his mother’s citrus groves claimed the porosity of the volcanic soil made for well-irrigated grapes, even in dry years, and incomparable wines.

But these were men who paid other men to till their acres. To Sal, the soil was only ever an enemy to be battled.

Bratchett spoke up suddenly: “Yesterday, Wolfe was stomping around town wanting to throw Ling Yong in jail, but not enough evidence. Which one of us you reckon they’ll be hauling in next?”

Sal shoveled peat moss and cured cow manure into the hole. “My being Sicilian, this is not the help to me.”

“Lord, you can say that again.” But Bratchett’s eyes were still kind.

“I was on the train,” Sal added. “And at the station. This has put me on a list to be watched.”

Bratchett straightened briefly from his shoveling. “Yep. You and me both.”

“You? But you have lived here many years, yes?”

Bratchett rolled up his left sleeve with his right hand, then, with his maimed arm hanging loose, he pulled up the right sleeve using his teeth. He gestured with his head to his arms. “Don’t take away from my color. Not to them that’s got a problem with it.”

Sal studied him. “We are alike, then.”

Bratchett’s mouth tipped up at one end. “Are we?”

“Men of suspicion.”

Bratchett chuckled. “Men who are suspect. Yep. That’d be us.” He flicked his hat back on his head. “And maybe also what you said: men of suspicion. I got my own theories on who’s hiding what.”

Sal lifted his voice toward Bratchett in the next hole. “This Tate, he does not like the newcomers? The owner of Biltmore?”

Dearg Tate himself loomed at the edge of his hole. “Heard my damn name.”

Bratchett kept his tone cheerful as his shovel kept time. “Back to work, Tate.”

Sal had kept his temper stoppered all morning. And now the stopper was edging loose. Looking up from the rock he’d just shattered, he tossed his shovel over his shoulder. “In Sicily, when a man—”

“Do I look,” Tate demanded, “like I give a damn about Sicily?”

Bratchett was shaking his head.

For Bratchett’s sake, Sal made himself go back to digging. “About this, you do not. And this is your loss.”

Sal heard the crunch of rocky soil as Tate landed beside him in the hole. Spinning around, Sal saw Bratchett leaping to yank Tate backward by his collar.

“Slow down a spell, Tate. Think. Schenck’ll fire you both, and you’ll be back to weeding your turnips full-time.”

Tate spat to one side. “Infestation.”

Bratchett kept one hand on Tate’s chest to hold him there. “Now that’s a bigger word than I’d have wagered you knew. Four syllables, even.”

As two other men hauled Tate back, Sal tipped an invisible cap. “A great country, this America is.” And he meant it. But then he heard himself add, “Where the infestation becomes the American. Pretty soon, we are all of us the Americans together, yes? The mark of a great country.”