Holding fast to each other, Sal and Nico followed the others to the back of the barn into what had been a cow stall, swept clean, its door broken off its hinges. In its middle was a pallet covered in patterned quilts, a man with gray skin unmoving at its center. To one side stood Rema and Kerry. And at the other, Robert Bratchett.
The man on the pallet was trying to speak, lifting his hand toward Kerry. It was his lips more than his crackle of a voice that made the words: “I’m . . . so . . . sorry.”
Then, to Sal’s surprise, the dying man turned his head toward Bratchett. And formed the same words: “I’m . . . so . . . sorry.”
Bratchett’s good arm went to his bad one. He nodded.
For long moments they all stood that way, MacGregor’s older daughter holding his right hand and his neighbor holding his left, Rema with an arm around each twin, and nobody speaking.
Kerry MacGregor bent over her father. “Daddy,” she said, then stopped and looked up to Rema and to Robert Bratchett, like they might know how to finish for her. The two gentlemen who’d ridden with Sal up from Biltmore she didn’t even seem to see as they stood silently behind their circle.
She looked back at the dying man. Tenderness was there in her face, but also anger. A strange mix that had her face pinched. “Daddy. I have so many questions.”
The man turned his face back to her. Tears rolled down both gray cheekbones.
The whole barn stilled. Even the mule in the next stall quit swishing his tail.
“So . . . very . . . sorry,” he whispered.
But that was all.
Tears ran down Kerry’s face, too. “It’s not enough,” she whispered. The tears coming faster now. “It’s not enough.” A sob escaped her throat. “God help me, I can’t just say it’s okay—that all the past is okay. I do not want to forgive you.” Tears streaming down her cheeks now, she sank to her knees. “I don’t want to. I don’t.”
“I know,” he managed. “I know.”
Dropping her face into her hands, her shoulders shook. “I love you.”
The man’s own tears coursed down gray, sunken cheeks, his eyes on her deep wells of pain—with a tenderness and regret that looked harder to bear than his body’s hurting.
After a moment, Kerry touched his hand. Then reached for something beside the man’s pallet. And rose, a bow in one hand, and a violin, Sal saw, in the other. Only here, maybe, it was a fiddle.
Kerry MacGregor began playing while her brother and sister and aunt—and also their neighbor—took turns bending over the man on the pallet and kissing his cheek.
She played one song after another as her father lay there—slow, keening songs, like the bow was raking right over the heart. Her head cocked over the instrument’s body, her tears splashed onto its weathered wood. Her hands, trembling as they played, made the notes deepen and sing, like they’d rise up through the roof of the barn, through the canopy of the forest, and through the mist that hung today over the mountains.
Sinking to hold Nico tighter, Sal let his brother turn and bury his small head in his chest. Nico, whom he’d not been able to protect as he should have. Whose shattered leg would never be right, never be without pain. Sal’s fault. If he’d only fought harder. If he’d only held on.
And yet here they were. Safe, at least for another few hours.
Sal squeezed shut his eyes.
The words spoken here seemed to twine through the keening notes, and they felt like the whole of what it was to be broken and hurting and human: I’m sorry, so very sorry, it’s not enough, I love you.
Chapter 54
The minister was speaking of a land where joys never end.
But Kerry was picturing the cabin when she was a child. There was her mother at the fire, stirring rabbit in a thick stew with mushrooms and wild onions picked that day from the woods. On the pine board table, a sorghum-sweetened cake in thin layers with cooked apples and cinnamon holding the stack together. The twins were toddling near the flames, but her father was placing one foot on the ladder-back chair he’d put in their path. He lifted his fiddle to his chin, his bow hand sweeping across the strings in wide, mournful arcs that drew heartbreak from the instrument’s hollow body.
Holding hands with each other and with two cornhusk dolls, the twins swayed as their father sang:
I’m just a poor wayfarin’ stranger
Travelin’ through this world of woe
Yet there’s no sickness, toil, or danger
In that bright world to which I go
I’m going there to see my father . . .
Kerry’s father had left school in third grade to work his own daddy’s farm. But he could finger the neck off a fiddle, the tunes like thread on a whirring spindle, pulling them close.
Kerry was vaguely aware of the people on the pew beside her: the twins on either side and Rema to her right; to her left, Robert and Ella Bratchett; and, just behind, Miss Hopson, who’d evidently left out of Grand Central Depot within hours of receiving Kerry’s telegram. The presence of all these steadied Kerry. Yet she still felt in danger of toppling.
Behind them were several people from Best—Kerry was in no mood to think of it as Biltmore Junction today—and from Asheville. There sat Ling Yong, his arm around Zhen, her eyes wide and curious on the crowd. Behind Ling, Moncrief and Mrs. Smythe and several others from the Biltmore staff.
Sal and Nico would be huddled up safe—please, God—in the dormant brickworks in the village where Biltmore’s bricks had been made. Though Leblanc would have no reason to connect Kerry with the Italians, he might’ve soon ferreted Sal out looking on the farm next to the Bratchetts’—especially now with the MacGregor farm about to be sold. Kerry felt the stab of that again in her gut.
John Cabot was there in the chapel, too. He was watching, waiting to meet her eye. Which she did—for one, jolting moment. But it was too much, the storm of emotions she felt around him.
As she was pulling her eyes away, he mouthed something to her: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. His face did look heavy—battered even—with pain.
Sorry for the death of her father, for her and the twins’ loss? Sorry for being with Vanderbilt and McNamee when they’d arrived with the contract on the farm? Sorry for kissing her in the falling snow weeks ago and then keeping his distance?
Their eyes held a long moment. And before hers dropped, he lifted two fingers of his right hand to the left side of his chest.
For the first time today, she felt her heart lift just a bit from the weight that threatened to crush it.
Beside him stood Charles McNamee and George Vanderbilt.
Here out of kindness and community ties, Kerry thought. And perhaps also to be sure the sale of the land goes through.
Which maybe wasn’t quite fair. But maybe she was allowed a thunderhead of emotions today.
Kerry refused to meet their eyes.
At least Madison Grant didn’t try to show his face here. The knife from her boot had at least had that much effect.
Far in the back corner of the little chapel stood Dearg Tate. Head down.
Kerry took a long breath. Tried to focus up there on the pulpit again.
“Because Johnny MacGregor,” the minister was saying, “was a man whose conduct might not have been perfect every day of his life.”