With that, she swept out the door, Robert Bratchett following silently behind her. Ella sprang from the porch up onto the ancient bay horse. Clucking to the animal, her husband walked beside them.
“There was some trouble,” he was telling his wife as the horse moved away from the door. “Down to the station. Fella got murdered . . .”
Suddenly, the man in the bed clutched his bedclothes to his chest and cried out. As if he’d heard that final word, murdered. As if that word had some kind of dreaded connection with him.
No longer staring blankly upward, his eyes had gone crazed. Frantic.
Kerry forced herself to reach for his hand. “What is it?”
At her feet, something moved. And then growled. Romeo, her father’s old bloodhound. Kerry had named him as a pup, though he’d taken to no one in the family but Johnny Mac.
“Maybe,” Rema whispered, “it’s knowing you was headed home on a train that got Johnny Mac stirred.”
Kerry watched her father’s eyes drop closed again. Seems like, she thought, his thrashing had more to do with hearing that word murdered.
She lowered her voice so the twins, a few feet away by the glowing coals of the hearth, would not hear. “He looks . . .”
The wasted frame, the sunken eyes.
Rema nodded. “Like death plum on the doorstep.”
For anyone else, Kerry would have bent then and kissed the gaunt figure on the forehead. Dropped her own tears onto his cheeks.
But for this man, who’d taught her to gauge exactly how much corn whiskey a man had downed by the sound of a fiddle—when the rills of music turned to long, mournful groans, or when the notes turned violent and reckless . . .
“Moves in and out of that fog, poor thing. Gets hisself clean wrung out. Give him castor oil packs and ratsbane tea all the day long for where he says it hurts, the liver complaint. But we all know what it is, all the years of the drink and more drink, and no undoing it now.” Rema patted Kerry’s arm. “He’ll be real glad to know you’re home, hon. Once he comes back to hisself.”
Together, they made a pallet on the floor for Kerry so that Rema could share the straw tick, also on the floor, with the twins. Kerry bent to kiss her aunt good night.
“And thank you. A thousand thank-yous.”
Rema patted her hand. “See you soon, sugar.” She did not say what they both knew: that Rema would be up and gone in the morning before first light.
Kerry’s sleep came tattered that night, disrupted by frayed images of a body sprawled on the ground. The people in the dream were mostly faceless, a blur of dark curly hair here and there—sometimes with a tweed cap or a top hat, sometimes with the long floppy ears of a bloodhound. A bicycle rolled through her dream, too, and Robert Bratchett’s ancient horse hobbled in and out as, somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed.
Kerry woke up in a sweat, despite the chill of the cabin. Blinking as her head cleared, she slid up on the floor to a sitting position, careful not to jostle Tully on Kerry’s right. Or to wake her father a few feet away on the cabin’s only real wooden bed.
The tent she’d made of three quilts and a broom handle thrust in the middle of the straw tick had at least kept the four of them on the floor warmer last night, and it had kept bits of rotted wood and tendrils of moss from the roof off them. It was caving in over their heads in several places. First thing today after sunup, she’d buttress the rafters as best she could and hew some shingles for patches.
The rain had been allowed to leak in for years, it appeared—whole beams rotted half through. Long term, whatever patches and propping up she could manage would do little good. But then, long term the bank would take the land if she couldn’t pay the taxes. Thinking long term was like a bear rousing from a long winter’s sleep—and there was no point inviting something ravenous in.
She’d take only this day that stretched out ahead.
Blessed are the poor—the peacemakers, too, her momma would have told Kerry now if she’d still been alive.
But her momma had died long before Kerry left for New York. Before Kerry’s father despaired of making ends meet on the farm and left for the cotton mill. Back before every outbuilding and fence and the cabin itself had sunk well past a crying need for repair. Before he’d come back beaten and sick—and also changed for the better, Rema claimed.
Quietly laying the fire, Kerry set the water to boil in the cast-iron kettle. Coffee this morning would have to be made from grains of wheat and ground-up chicory plant since there was nothing else. Stepping outside onto the porch, she scanned the clearing, the farm’s outbuildings taking shape in the pearl gray of early dawn.
A possum on his way to sleep was skulking at the base of the smokehouse. Snagging the breechloader from just inside the door, Kerry moved forward a few soundless steps, then fired without taking time to steady her aim. The shot nevertheless hit home—straight through the head. The gun, though, kicked with a vengeance, knocking Kerry hard in the jaw. The creature rolled to its back and lay still.
One hand touching the sore place on her jaw, Kerry plucked the possum up by its tail and swung it over her left shoulder. With her right hand, she peeled bark from a dogwood. Seeping that in boiling water would ease the pounding in her head—from the breechloader’s kick and from the weight of what life was asking of her now. Armed with the possum and the bark, along with the blasted breechloader she’d always despised, Kerry crossed the clearing back to the cabin.
With the crackling of the fire—or, more likely, from the one blast of the gun—the twins were rising now, staggering to two pairs of gangly thirteen-year-old legs. Jursey buttoned his only other shirt on top of the one he’d slept in and snatched up the milk pail as he lumbered out the door. Eyes only half-open, Tully shrugged on their daddy’s wool coat and stumbled out in the half dawn toward the chicken house.
Only three throbbed inside Kerry’s head. Only three hens left, Rema had said on the train ride home. And the mule, Malvolio, already slumping in his traces two years ago, already at the porch stoop of death. And the cow, Ophelia, Rema had warned her, was now no more than a moving skeleton, her dirty brown hide stretched tight across jutting hip bones—though Rema had tried to make it sound more cheerful than that. “A mite too much lean” had been among Rema’s carefully worded phrases, but Kerry knew what this meant.
A half hour later, Jursey stumbled into the cabin with a pail of fresh milk from Ophelia and with buttermilk chilled from the springhouse. Kerry stirred a splash of it into the biscuit batter, then spooned batter onto the griddle suspended above the flames. She turned her back to her brother as she cut two thin slices of the salt pork for the twins and none for herself. She would eat standing up so they couldn’t see what her plate was missing.
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.”