Under a Gilded Moon(5)

Lifting her head groggily, Tully sat up. Followed her sister’s glance. “Kerry, this here’s our friend. Showed me and Jursey the prettiest sketch of Mr. Vanderbilt’s house just before you boarded back in New York.”

The man’s face paled. He’d clearly not meant for others to know about this.

Kerry held out her hand—proper manners be hanged. “Kerry MacGregor.”

He extended his and they shook. “Marco Bergamini,” he said. His lips formed the sounds deliberately, taking great care with each syllable—an odd way to pronounce one’s own name. “This”—he gestured toward a sleeping child of about eight—“is Carlo. My brother.”

Again, the deliberate care with the name. And the boy’s name was different from the one the man had called out in the depot.

Kerry cocked her head at the man and smiled. “New names for a new place?”

Aunt Rema turned her head slightly and rolled her eyes. “There’s times when a gift can come off as just a big pain in the donkey’s shank.”

No, Kerry wanted to argue. Never a gift.

There’d been her poor momma, always in bed and often too sad to move from a string of babies born smaller than cornhusk dolls, and just as still. And her daddy: not a bad man when he was sober. But so very different when he was not.

Like the whiskey seeped into his brain and relit every glowing coal of betrayal—every collapse of grain prices, every humiliation when a merchant demanded cash instead of barter. All that scorched through his blood and settled, so far as Kerry could tell, in his right arm.

Kerry learned young to hear when her father’s stride was hitching—a stumble or slide. The faintest blur of a word.

To know when to snatch up the twins and run.

So, no. Not a gift. Just a survival skill she’d never asked to learn.

The not–Marco Bergamini opened his mouth as if he’d defend himself—and his name, which she’d challenged. But then he touched the brim of his cap. “It is the pleasure.”

“The pleasure’s mine,” Kerry returned as he swiveled away.

She leaned up close to her aunt’s ear. “Rema, why would that man have a sketch of the Biltmore?”

“Mighta told you his ownself if you hadn’t just shy of accused him of making up his own name.” Rema dropped her yarn. “Near up to home, and I plum forgot what I brung.”

She unwrapped a red cloth, the aroma of fried ham and cinnamon wafting throughout the coach. From her feet, she lifted a large Mason jar and unscrewed its metal lid.

“The sweet milk’s not been cold for some time, but I don’t reckon it’s gone blinked, chilly as my feet tell me they been on this floor.” She plunged a broad knife into a smaller jar filled with fried apples. After slipping a slice of salt pork and a knife blade of apples inside two biscuits, she handed one to each of the twins. Then one to the reporter and three to Kerry, who passed two to the not–Marco Bergamini and his brother, just rousing.

Rema nodded toward the child. “Poor little thing’s got to have the mulligrubs by now, long as he’s traveled.”

“So hungry that he’s despondent,” Kerry translated. And the two Italians looked relieved.

“How very kind,” said the reporter. But he offered his back.

Rema frowned. “Well, son, it was a hog who’d got some real age on him and not much lust left for the living, if that helps your squeamish.”

Kerry opened her mouth to explain to her aunt, but the reporter gave Rema a smile that mollified her. “Thank you, madam, for wanting to share.”

Kerry bit down on the apples and salt pork and the biscuit that melted away in her mouth. Then squeezed Rema’s shoulder.

“Don’t have none of these,” Rema said, “up there in that briggity city.”

The older of the Italians, having propped Carlo up to eat a biscuit, now bit into his own. “Oh,” he said, more groan than word. “Mio dio.”

Looking pleased, Rema picked up her knitting. “Well, mio dio yourself, hon.”

Her needles clicked. Outside the colors were dimming to gray, but inside the car, hanging bulbs swung, yellow and warm. The train clacked and clattered, all of them in the first car lulled into silence. Fingers of late-afternoon sun reached through the windows as they hurtled along.

Kerry tried to make herself plan what she’d be needing to say. How’re you feeling today, Daddy?

So far so good.

I hear you’ve quit drinking. All these years after driving Momma into her grave. You selfish bastard.

She sighed. Not good opening lines after two years away.

She’d like to see him grovel for mercy. Beg for forgiveness.

Which Johnny MacGregor, come hell or high water—and then a heap more of hell—would never do.

Kerry felt the rock and the rattle of the train beneath her, its comforting sway on the wide bends as they climbed higher into the Blue Ridge Mountains. To her left, the man with his little brother and the rolled paper tube clutched to his chest slumped lower into his seat. Head drooping, he fell asleep.

Out the window, blurred bands of green formed themselves into trees as the train began slowing. A passenger shambled into the aisle. Kerry felt her body relax for the first time since the cable arrived.

Then, suddenly, a screech of the train’s brakes, its whistle blasting. A lurch.