With a flicker of fear, Kerry thought, before the defiance set in again.
Even as he stepped back to let her inside, saying nothing in the way of greeting, his face had already shut down to defensive. Walled off.
He motioned to a chair. But remained standing himself. So Kerry did, too.
“I won’t keep you long, Dearg.”
He crossed his arms over the wide breadth of his chest.
“It’s good to see you,” she began. The truth was she’d have rather chewed rusty nails than come here to ask what she had to ask.
His voice came hoarse, more emotion behind it than he would let show. “Good to see you, too.”
“Dearg, I’m not here to challenge your decision to sell your land. I know as well as anybody how hard it is to hang on. Especially now, with so few of us left.”
His face relaxed a bit. Again he motioned her to a chair, and this time they both sat.
Kerry let her eyes roam over the room. Just a small, iron-framed bed and wooden dresser, and an army cot in one corner—no doubt for Jerome, who must be at school. Dearg had brought little with him from his homeplace, his mother’s spinning wheel and churn and loom probably all left for the workmen who would surely dismantle the cabin now that the land was part of Biltmore. He’d brought three guns, though: his great-grandfather’s old flintlock hung over the bed, the Winchester stood propped near the door, and a pistol sat on the small table. As if he needed to be ready for some sort of violence that could arrive at his door any moment.
Her eyes moved from the door and its rifle back to him.
“Ain’t a safe world anymore,” he said.
“Was it ever?”
His face, ruddy and handsome, contorted now—almost as if he wanted to cry. “Things was good before. Not easy. But good. Now look. At you and me, our land. We been shoved out. And by what? Some rich Yankees think they can hoard half the Blue Ridge. And a pack of foreigners coming here with all their damn crime.”
“You mean the murder?”
He looked away. “Not just that.”
“What else?”
“There’s all kind of damage they come here to do.” The amber of his eyes softened a moment. “You need protecting.” He reached out a big, callused hand and touched her knee, but then looked quickly away.
“No, Dearg. I don’t. I’m just fine.”
He stared at her for a moment. Then clenched his jaw. His eyes that had been warm on her only a moment ago had gone cold. Defiant.
“Look as much doubtful as you want, Kerry MacGregor. You’ll see. It’s liable to not be our own damn country much longer. They’re taking over.”
“Who’s they?”
“All them who shouldn’t come in the first place—don’t belong. The dagos. The Jews. The coloreds. All them.”
Kerry thought of Aunt Rema’s advice and counted to ten. “Isn’t this really more about your feeling pushed out?”
“You wait. Whole damn race’ll be lost if things keep on like this.”
“What race are we running here?”
“Not running. It’s the white race that’s fixing to pass. Here. France. Germany. Everywhere. There’s research—scientific—to prove it. Just a matter of time. Won’t be nothing left of us. ’Less things get changed. Fast.”
The white race. Kerry blinked, the image of that telegram Madison Grant received flashing into her mind: Gallic rooster. Part of the crest hanging in Farnsworth’s office, and a symbol of French pride. Reichsadler must be a German word, though she’d no idea what it meant—some symbol of German pride, surely. So the bald eagle must stand for the United States, not some wildlife preservation effort of Grant’s.
And the cable’s last words: the race will be lost if we continue this way. So, then, the sender had used race with a double meaning: a competition about to be lost, but also a reference, fearful and frantic, to skin color and nationalism.
“My God, Dearg. How did Madison Grant and Farnsworth and their sort infect you?”
He pulled his pocket watch out and set it on his thigh. Kerry felt as if its second hand were throbbing inside the room. “Kerry MacGregor and her famous noticings, that it?”
“Dearg. I know you.” His eyes met hers, and for a moment, she could see only the old schoolhouse slates, the forget-me-not flower chains, the bare feet in icy spring creeks. “You’re parroting these things. What you’re saying—it’s not the boy or the young man I knew.”
Her eyes swept over his room again, landing this time on the table to her left. She’d noticed only the pistol last time she’d looked, but now she saw the stack of paper beside it. Crudely printed with bold type and caricatures.
Kerry held up one of the flyers. “A man like Madison Grant seems so suave and polished and smart, but he can suck you down in a whole river of trouble. Cause a whole ocean of hurt.”
The look Dearg leveled at her roiled with resentment. Anger that radiated from him.
And also confusion, Kerry thought, at being left behind in a world changing so fast, so utterly—the ground shifting under his feet while he tries just to stand still.
“Dearg, was it you who vandalized Ling Yong’s shop?”
Rising, he walked to the door. Ran a hand over the muzzle of his Winchester. His way of saying he was done talking.
“Dearg, it’s Christmas Eve. We’ve known each other our whole lives. We—”
“Been damn important to each other,” he finished for her, his voice gone hoarse.
He opened the door for her. To leave.
“Merry Christmas, Kerry MacGregor,” he said.
She waited, searching his eyes to see if he really meant her to go like this. Shoved out.
She squeezed shut her eyes against the sweet images of the past: the barn dances, the stolen kisses beside the falls.
When she opened them, he’d pressed his lips hard together in his square jaw, trapping in words he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say. For an instant, his eyes softened again, his hand lifting as if he would touch her face. But the hand dropped. The eyes looked away.
“Merry Christmas, Dearg Tate,” she whispered. And left.
Chapter 31
Leblanc glowered at the telegrapher, this scrawny little man with a mangy beard on the other side of the glass—and splotchy teeth, Leblanc saw, like spots of a dog’s urine in snow. “You heard me. A cable to New Orleans. And I don’t have all day.”
Waiting by a sleigh near the platform, a groom in full livery was stomping his feet to keep warm. Full livery. Here. Miles past the middle of nowhere. What the hell was that about?
The telegrapher appeared not to take well to goading from an outsider. Damn these provincial idiots—this whole sorry excuse for a town. The man sat down with exaggerated slowness at his machine. “You want this telegram to go to . . . who’d you say in New Orleans?”
“Mr. Maurice Barthélemy.”
“Spell that name.”
Leblanc sounded out the letters.
“Sender’s name?”
“L-E-B-L-A-N-C.”
A beat of silence. “And you’d like to say . . . what?”
“Followed here from Penn quarry. Stop. Closing in on Catalfamo. Stop.”