Under a Gilded Moon(59)
In one movement, Dearg raised his rifle and fired over their heads, the gun’s report echoing over the trees.
That was his answer, she knew. The total of what he would tell her right now. Like that blast as the bullet left its chamber was the sound of his loss. A bullet shot into the blue sky but falling through the pines to the ground—powerless now. A man who’d soon have a wad of money in hand, exiling himself from his home.
Kerry stood alone outside the cabin as he mounted the porch and slammed the door so hard that chinks of clay fell out of the logs near the frame.
When exactly John Cabot gave up on speaking with her and left, she didn’t know.
The sun beginning to sink behind the mountains, Kerry hugged her arms over her chest. She suddenly felt very cold. And very alone.
Kerry told herself she was playing the fiddle that night to calm the twins, who’d been harried all day by a restive Johnny Mac; cantankerous, ungenerous hens; and Malvolio, who’d brayed for hours as they’d tried to tighten the tanned hides over their banjo gourds. But the truth was that she needed to play for herself.
She’d not picked up a bow for years. Her father had taught her the fiddle when she was hardly old enough to stand. She tuned the strings now with a kind of frantic need to hold her life together by wrapping the betrayal in strains of music.
Long and mournful they came, each song she played. Songs handed down through the decades—centuries, even. Songs of sorrow and longing and loss.
She played on as the twins fell asleep, their hands blistered but both their faces smoothed into peace for the first night since she’d come home. She played as her father lay staring up at the ceiling boards of their cabin as if scenes from his life were flickering there.
Or perhaps, Kerry thought with a stab of pity, he’s seeing its end.
She was finally lifting the fiddle back to its place on the wall when a rustling stopped her. A soft rattle from inside the fiddle’s body.
Turning it over, she shook it. A rectangular paper fell behind the strings, but was blocked by the size of the hole.
Shaking the fiddle and using her fingers like pincers, Kerry plucked the small paper out. Blank on one side. So maybe only a mistake that it had fallen inside.
On the other side, though, two men in a faded photo stared back at her. Their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Their military uniforms crumpled. Behind them, an American flag. Even with the blur of the black and white, Kerry knew their uniforms had to be blue.
Two soldiers. Two buddies.
Two neighbors.
The man beside the much younger version of her daddy was Robert Bratchett.
Turning toward the bed where her father lay, she held up the photo. His eyes latched onto the image, and even across the cabin’s one room, Kerry saw the spark of recognition in them. Silently, she crossed the floor to him.
“Daddy?” She asked it more gently than she’d addressed him since she’d come home.
He could lift one hand only an inch or so off the bed, but he reached for the old photo. He opened his mouth as if he would speak. But no words came out.
Instead, the tears flowed. And he turned his face to the wall.
Chapter 23
A week had passed since her visit to Dearg’s cabin, and Kerry still felt betrayed and bitter, as if she and the Bratchetts stood alone, two little islands of independence surrounded by a rising ocean of wealth they couldn’t possibly keep back forever. She’d taken her day off this week to spend at the farm, as always, but also to walk here to Riverside Cemetery with the twins.
Kerry spotted the Italians across the graveyard, the older one’s walk stealthy and quiet, his eyes darting left and then right.
Like a fox sniffing for hounds, Kerry thought.
He held his brother’s hand, the boy swinging his bad leg in arcs to keep up.
Guiding Tully and Jursey behind a fold of the hill, Kerry watched the Italians moving from gravestone to gravestone, heads ducked.
“It’s an awful long walk from the farm to Momma’s grave.” Tully’s voice wobbled on the edge of exhaustion.
Jursey placed a hand on each knee to help himself up the next incline. Riverside Cemetery was like a blanket of homespun that someone had lifted in the middle and set gently down, with its steep, stiff folds all around leading up to a peak. “Reckon Kerry’s got to be more tuckered than us, taking her afternoon off to come here.”
Tully scowled at being bested. Giving both their shoulders a friendly shove, Kerry heard her brother’s comment for what it was: tender-hearted compassion—and also positioning himself as the currently sweeter sibling.
Tully left her scowl intact to ask, “Kerry, you reckon he wishes he could go back in time—do things different?”
Kerry didn’t have to ask who he was. She let a breath out through her mouth. “Reckon none of us live past thirteen without something we wish we’d lived better.”
Tully frowned at this, evidently reviewing her young life.
“I reckon,” Jursey charged ahead, “he’s been trying to show he’s changed.”
Tully crossed her arms. “You always did defend him. Ever’ last time.”
“He always needed defending,” Jursey returned simply.
The three of them pulled to a halt in front of a simple headstone with no dates, only a name: Missy Murray MacGregor. Even that had cost them a goat they couldn’t afford to lose.