The hand on his shoulder belonged to one of the darker-skinned workers, a fellow named Bratchett. The man had just one fully functioning arm, the other useful only for steadying things. But he worked harder and lifted more with his one arm, Sal had noticed, than the other men did with two. He was gesturing now with his head to where the leader of the forestry crew, a German, was gathering the men near a just-planted birch. Swinging his shovel over his shoulder, Sal joined the group.
“Two newer members of our crew,” Schenck announced in a thick accent. “They have both started this week, although you may not have met them yet. I had one working on the Approach Road and the other near the Bass Pond. To my right, this is Marco Bergamini.”
Sal heard a murmur ripple through the crowd, some of the eyes on him hostile. There’d been no point in trying to pass as not Italian once he’d had to present Vanderbilt’s card and the story from Florence. But he’d still have to go by the fake name. More than ever now that Berkowitz had been killed.
Who knew what someone had known about the story the reporter planned to expose? Enough, apparently, to be willing to kill to stop him. Whether or not that someone had learned also of Sal’s involvement, that remained to be seen. Regardless, the sheriff had clearly believed nothing Sal tried to explain, eyeing him like a child claiming monsters had gathered under his bed.
“Dago,” one of the forestry crew muttered.
But others only leaned on their shovels and nodded to him—the kind of men who reserve judgment until they’ve seen a coworker in action. Their respect, Sal knew, he could earn by pulling his end of the crosscut saw.
“And this to my left is Dearg Tate. He is new here, yes, but he knows these mountains well.”
Vell, Schenck pronounced it, the man’s accent nearly as hard for Sal to understand as the speech of these mountain men. But as part of the “old immigrant” crowd from Western Europe, Schenck’s being fresh from Germany was acceptable, evidently. And his skin was the white of minced garlic.
Rubbing the back of his hand across a grizzled chin, Dearg Tate nodded to several men in the crowd.
“Well, hell, Dearg,” an older man said. He stroked a bushy beard and spit tobacco to his left. “Thought you’d be the last damn man alive come work for Vanderbilt. You havin’ plenty to say these last years about folks who—how was it you put it?—sold the hell out.”
Tate, already big, drew himself bigger. “Reckon I changed my damn mind.”
“Reckon he got it changed for him,” muttered a man in a felt hat, ragged on one side as if a dog had chewed on it.
The older man spit again. “Like the rest of us, you reckoned it was better to get paid regular-like than wonder what the weather and deer and beetles got in store for your measly crops. Only here’s the thing: didn’t none of us but you call it spineless to come here looking for work.”
Tate puffed out his chest.
Bratchett stepped in front of him. “So you got a bruise to your pride by deciding to come ask for a job. So what?”
“I didn’t go askin’ for nothin’.”
“Steady now.” Bratchett raised a palm to push Tate back a step.
Tate swatted it away and turned to Sal, then back to Bratchett. “You and Ella done me and mine a good turn here and there over the years. But don’t go thinking that puts us in the circle of friendly.”
Bratchett leaned on his shovel. “Won’t catch me making that kind of wild-ass assumption.” He winked sideways at Sal. “Our land might’ve been cheek to jowl with y’all’s for years. Mighta come through plenty of starvin’ seasons. But why would that make us some kind of friendly?”
Tate swung his pickax overhead and down into the mountain rock with such force the other men on the knoll spun around, the sound echoing through the forest. Schenck, a few yards away and conversing with another worker, turned in his saddle.
“With that sort of force there, we just might get us a forest planted.” Winking at the men, Bratchett jerked his head toward Tate. “And with that kind of temper from him, we’re all likely to end up prostrate in tree holes.”
A tremor of laughter rumbled over the knoll. Most of the men kept their heads down, and their eyes away from Tate’s as he stalked off.
Bratchett wiped sweat away with his sleeve. “Don’t take it personal, Bergamini. Dearg, he’d be the next to youngest of twelve. Left here for a while to work for a cotton mill in Whitnel, east of the mountains. Hired on as recruiting agent. Come back just recent. Got a whole lot of bitter and bile left in the dregs.”
Sal knew a thing or two about this. “He was a farmer, no?”
Bratchett lifted one shoulder. “Much as anyone deep in these mountains. Some tobacco. Some greens and wheat. Fair bit of corn. Pigs. Shack for salting the meat. Tell you what, though. He never much cottoned to farming.”
Sal plunged the shovel into a patch of loamy black soil that was free, for once, of rock. “Yes. The resentment I know.”
“I reckon the gall for him now is having to work for outsiders he hates for getting richer every day. And maybe the gall of having to work alongside the likes of you and me. Not every place in this country puts whites together on work crews with people like us.”
Bratchett hurled another shovelful. “Half the men in these mountains, maybe most by now, find the steady pay hard to turn down, especially after the Panic couple years back. Compared with worrying over the weather or the health of the livestock or if the soil’s gone tired, at least here the pay comes regardless.”
As he sliced his own shovel into the dirt, Sal pictured Sicily—the soil of the lemon grove behind their red-tile-shingled hut: desiccated. Gone gray and dry with too many years of citrus growing, and no more fertilizer from the landowner’s horses they no longer tended.
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.”