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.
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.