Under a Gilded Moon(60)

Jursey’s forehead buckled. “How come she didn’t want to be buried on the farm with Daddy’s people?”

“Because . . .” Kerry hesitated. “Momma’s people were more from Asheville itself.” She pointed to other graves nearby with the name Murray.

And because the twins were only thirteen, only teetering on the ragged tin edge of adulthood, she didn’t add the full bucket of truth: that their momma had had enough of the farm and a life of privation by the time she passed. Her final luxury—her first one in years—had been to be buried in town, with her maiden name an extra expense on the stone. In death, at least, she’d finally taken her stand.

Tully was still nursing her scowl. “He could’ve quit off the drinking before when he did. Kerry recollects better’n us how bad it was. How sad it made”—she nodded toward the headstone as her eyes filled—“her.”

Kerry had no words to push back at this. She knelt to brush leaves off the gravestone.

As if reseeing scenes now that she’d not been old enough to understand at the time, Tully stood looking away. “I think Momma hated him sometimes for it. And then just her being swole up with sadness, all those babies she lost.”

None of them said the word stillborn. But all three of them looked at the gravestone. A good half-dozen brothers and sisters born blue, not breathing. Their mother had wanted And Children added to her marker whenever she died, but when it came time, their father could only afford her name.

“And,” he’d slurred, drunk for three days straight after her death, “how the hell’d it look, that And Children, with the damn three of you not very damn dead?”

Kerry’s expression was rueful as she turned back to Tully. “She loved him enough to hate him for all the drinking. ’Cause when he drank, he wasn’t himself.”

Tully knelt to trace the letters of her mother’s name. “And I think she hated herself a good piece, too, for acting like nothing much happened after he’d got to raging or shot through the roof. How ’bout you, Kerry—you forgive him yet?”

Kerry linked her arms through her sister’s. I’m trying, she wanted to be able to say, if only for Jursey’s sake. But even that wasn’t much true.

She scanned the undulating green and brown of the cemetery—the rhododendrons with their waxy green foliage curled against the cold.

No more sign of the Italians, at least. She released a breath in relief. Quite possibly, they meant no harm. But whatever in their past brought them here, made them change their names, made the older one jump every time the door of the train opened, best to keep the twins clear of trouble.

“Ciao.”

The Italians appeared from behind a row of marble monuments. Little Carlo a shadow behind his brother.

“How long have you been there?” She asked it calmly. Not quite an accusation of spying. Still, she had Tully and Jursey to protect.

The twins both ran to little Carlo, Tully’s whole body bouncing as her arm pumped up and down, shaking his small hand.

Marco Bergamini—or whatever his name really was—gestured back with his head. “I am looking for a man who perhaps is here. A man who”—he searched for the word—“carried my brother one night.”

“Carried your brother?” the twins asked together.

“When it was thought I had died. In another place far from here.” As if offering this next phrase up to Kerry’s scrutinizing stare, he added, “New Orleans.”

Jursey’s head tilted. “I thought you come from Pennsylvania.”

Bergamini shifted his weight. “Before Pennsylvania, before the cutting for stone in the quarries, we lived, my brother and I, in New Orleans.” He smiled at them sadly. “And before that, Italy. Florence. And Palermo.”

Kerry did not miss his shifting of weight. His uneasiness. But there was also something fractured in him that struck her as unable to hold in the spillage of lies very well. As if he might now be ready to offer up truth—or a piece of it.

“I ask all over town when I am . . . when I have the afternoon not to work. I ask about the man Cernoia. If he came here as we have heard. If he is still living here.” He shook his head.

Tully’s eyes saucered. “So your plan’s to knock on every godlovin’ door in the Blue Ridge?”

“Si.”

Jursey swept a hand over the cemetery. “If you all’d be looking here, sounds like you ain’t even sure this man Cernoia’s still alive and kicking.”

Tully smacked him. “You don’t got to say what’s strung up and salted right there in front of your face, Jurs.”

Kerry had already seen those words, the weight of them in Marco Bergamini’s eyes.

He shook his head. “Non lo so. He may be dead, yes. And also . . .” This part he seemed to consider whether to tell them or not. “There may have been the reason for the man to change what was his name.”

“Like you?” Kerry asked—but more gently now than she did on the train.

Hesitating again, he lifted his head. Then lowered it just a notch. A nod. Almost imperceptible. But a confession, she realized.

Kerry gazed out over the hill, rumpled and studded with gravestones. Then ended on her mother’s marker: Missy Murray MacGregor.

“Do you know any other names he might have been likely to use? His mother’s maiden name, maybe? Or maybe there are names in Italian that had meaning for him.”