Moon Over Manifest (9 page)

“Yes, he told me lots of things. He said there was a man who drove a cart around town and brought fresh milk to people’s doorsteps. And ladies who’d walk down the street in white gloves and fancy hats with big feathers sticking way up. But it’s like he was telling things you’d notice from the tree house. Storefronts and activity, people going here and there, but only what you could see from a distance. Nothing up close. Why, I only heard about you a few weeks ago. Did he write to you at all?”

Shady paused and his shoulders looked heavy. “A postcard now and then. Sometimes, when folks move on, it’s hard to look back. It’s not their fault. We knew he wandered a bit after he left here, but then we got word that he had a little girl, and we knew he’d take good care of you.”

I did warm a little at that but I wasn’t ready to be done grumbling. I stuck my chin on my fists. “Well, Gideon’s telling of Manifest was nothing like Miss Sadie’s. Her story was full of names and faces and who did what where. I learned more about Manifest in one sitting with her than from all of Gideon’s stories put together,” I grumped. But I still hadn’t learned anything about Gideon.

Shady looked up, and with the sun gleaming in through the stained glass, he looked like he was having a revelation.

“Yes, that Miss Sadie sure can weave a story. I bet she could fill in some of the missing pieces.”

I don’t know if Shady would’ve said more, but he looked relieved to hear a jingle at the door.

Lettie and Ruthanne poked their heads in. “Hey, Abilene?” Then, remembering their manners, they added, “Good morning, Shady.”

“Good morning,” he answered. “Would you girls care for a glass of buttermilk?”

“Yes, please,” Lettie and Ruthanne answered together.

Shady went into the back room and Lettie whispered, “First we have to sell some eggs in town. Then we can work on the Rattler mystery. We’ve made a list of suspects. Mr. Cooper, the barber. Mr. Koski at the diner. Hattie Mae.”

“Hattie Mae?” I whispered back.
The nice newspaper lady?
“Surely you don’t think she’s the Rattler?”

“Well, not really, but she’s got a sweet tooth and she’ll probably give us a licorice whip or some jelly beans if we stop by. But we’ll start with Mr. DeVore, the postmaster.”

Mention of Hattie Mae made me think of something. “Wait a minute. I need to run back upstairs.” I went up and thumbed through the newspapers I’d selected from Hattie Mae’s office. I found her column in both and gave each a quick look-see. It was the one from October 11 that rang a bell. I carefully tore it out and made a point to take another look through Hattie Mae’s old newspapers later.

As I went back downstairs, Shady was pouring the buttermilk. “What are you girls up to today?”

“Uh, we’re doing some corporal works of mercy. Mr. DeVore needs visiting.”

“Oh, he does? Is he sick?”

“Sick?” Ruthanne pondered the question. “I guess you could say that. If you consider loneliness a sickness. Who wouldn’t be? Spending all day sorting everybody else’s letters from dear ones far and near and never having a loving word sent your way.”

Shady looked like he’d been given more answer than he’d asked for. “Well, you be sure to give him my regards. Tell him we missed him at last night’s service and we’d be pleased to have him come next week at the same time.” He reached behind the bar, where he’d stashed something earlier, and took out that something wrapped in a brown paper bag. “Good day, girls,” he said as he left.

There was an awkward silence as I thought about what might be in that bag. Then Ruthanne said, “Come on, Abilene. Finish up and let’s go.”

“Can’t,” I said before washing down the last of my biscuit with some buttermilk.

“Why not?” asked Lettie.

I handed her the October 11 “Hattie Mae News Auxiliary.” The paper was a little wet from my sweaty hand. “I got a debt to work off.”

“Y
ou can’t be serious,” Lettie said as the three of us peered through the wrought iron gate in front of Miss Sadie’s house. Ruthanne and Lettie thought I was crazy to be going to work for her. I’d told them all about Ned and Jinx and the poison ivy as we’d kicked up parched leaves on the way over from Shady’s place, and they’d read Hattie Mae’s column.

“Read it again, if you want. Buster Holt and Elroy Knabb. Calamine lotion? Those were the two guys at the Klan rally in Miss Sadie’s story. They used poison ivy for toilet paper. At least that much of her story was true,” I argued.

“You don’t know that for sure. And for crying out loud, don’t you know what ‘perdition’ means?” Lettie pointed to the sign on the iron gate.

I nodded. “I know what it means,” I said. I recalled a preacher in Des Moines who had warned folks who had
come for a soup supper to give up their evil ways and stay off the path to perdition. My stomach had been a little upset after that.

“What if she’s a witch and casts a spell over you?” asked Lettie.

“She’s not a witch. More than likely she’s just crazy,” I said, even though I didn’t believe that either.

“Like a fox,” Ruthanne said, chewing on a blade of grass. “Be careful, Abilene. That old woman might have more up her sleeves than jangly bracelets.”

My confidence was seeping out of me like water through a bucket full of holes. I wished Lettie and Ruthanne could go with me, but they had eggs to sell. Besides, it was my debt to work off. “I broke her pot and I want to get my compass back. It’s as simple as that. I’ll meet you at Hattie Mae’s later on.”

I took my leave with all kinds of frightful images rolling around in my head. Miss Sadie’s house seemed lifeless, as there was no breeze to give breath to her wind chimes. So I was glad when I found her out back and she said she’d have me working in the garden that day, although calling it a garden required a whole lot of imagination. Mostly what I did was break up clods of dirt. Miss Sadie sat in a metal patio chair, smoking a corncob pipe and giving me instructions on how to put my weight into that shovel to turn up the dirt.

Just what she figured on planting in that parched earth, I couldn’t reckon. It reminded me of sermons I’d heard from priests and preachers about planting in dry soil. Those seeds would just wither up and blow away, never taking root.

“Deeper. Dig deeper,” Miss Sadie said in her rich voice. “The ground should not merely cover the seed. It must embrace it.”

“What kinds of things do you plan on growing here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Miss Sadie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She sniffed the air around her, as if it would give her the answer. “It is not yet clear.”

I took a whiff too, but all I smelled was dirt. Dry, dusty dirt. Seemed like that was all there’d ever been. Oh, I had a vague notion of green grass, soft and wavy. Before Gideon and I were on the road, he’d worked as a groundskeeper at the Maple Grove Park in Chicago. I was three or four and we’d lived at a boardinghouse across the street. I thought there had been swings, but I had been so young and the memories were so distant that it could have been a dream.

“I wonder what it was like before the world went dry,” I said, looking up into the sun.

“The world? Pah. What is it you know of the world?”

“I know that any place I’ve been to is dead dry.”

“I suppose. But what appears to be dead can still hold life.” Her voice sounded small and far away. That day she wore a light housedress instead of her velvety fortune-teller garb, but it seemed like she was fixing to go into another one of her trances anyway. And since my back was aching for a chance to stretch out, I decided to help her along.

“So, what about that Klan rally?” I asked. I’d heard of really bad things Klan folks did to Negroes. Mean, hateful, deadly things. I didn’t know they were hateful toward white folks too.

“They think they hide their hate behind a mask,” she said, her accent thick, “but it is there for all to see.”

“And the boy whose girl got sore at him over the fish? And his friend?” I asked, pretending to be disinterested enough not to remember their names. “What happened to them?”

“Ned and Jinx,” she answered. “They are a match from the start. Jinx is cocky and streetwise. He knows a con for every day of the week. But he knows little of friendship and home. Ned provides both. He takes Jinx to Shady’s place, where many a wayward soul is welcome and no questions are asked.”

So Jinx must’ve been the one who’d hidden the letters and mementos under the floorboards at Shady’s house. “I’ll say. My money’s betting that Shady ran a speakeasy. He’s got the perfect setup to have run one of those secret saloons with the hidden cabinets and movable bar top for hiding illegal alcohol away when the law would come calling.” I spoke of it as if it was only in the past, but from what I’d gleaned of Shady, I wasn’t so sure. I waited for Miss Sadie to confirm or deny.

“Shady and Jinx share something in common. They both have dealings they are reluctant to reveal,” Miss Sadie said, not telling me if I’d win my bet. “It is clear Jinx runs from something, but Shady asks for no explanation.” I figured that was about as much answer as I was going to get. “It is not the first time he takes in a stranger in need. But, he says, Jinx must attend school. Sister Redempta takes him into her classroom.”

“I bet she plopped an assignment on him right off the bat too.”

“It is possible. In a town of immigrants, new students come all the time.”

“Is that how Ned got here?” I asked, wanting to stretch out my stretching out.

Miss Sadie breathed in again. “He comes to America on a boat, yes. But to Manifest, he comes by train. A train for orphans. He stays with the Sisters for a time. Sister Redempta cares for him. But he is a little boy, five years old, of undetermined nationality, so he belongs to all the people. Of course, it is Hadley Gillen, the widower hardware store owner, who adopts him as his own. But the town grows to love the boy and imagine that his future can be theirs as well.”

It got quiet as Miss Sadie lingered in the past. The heat took over me like a dream. A hot breeze seemed to conjure up exotic smells and faces of colorful people. People who had come from their various parts of the world to build a better life.

I stretched out my body under the willow tree, my face feeling cooler in its shade. Somehow, I felt like I was one of those people. Someone taken out of one place and put into another. A place where I didn’t belong.
Why did my daddy really send me here?
I wondered. “Why here?”

“The coal mines.” Miss Sadie answered my question that I didn’t realize I’d asked out loud. “People need work and the mines need workers. It sounds like a good match, but most do not realize the mines will consume them.” It took me a minute to realize she wasn’t talking about Gideon or me but about the people of Manifest years ago. She was heading into another story and I hadn’t even paid her a dime. Miss Sadie must have figured that since she wasn’t getting paid,
she wouldn’t put on quite as much of a show as before. This time she left off all the divining gyrations and jingle-jangle antics and just started her story, plain and simple.

“The mine whistle was the sound that brought us together. And kept us apart at the same time.…”

The shrill whistle of the Devlin Coal Mine signaled the end of one shift and the beginning of another. Jinx gripped the handlebars of a dilapidated bicycle and shuddered in the midmorning breeze as he waited for Ned to emerge from the mine shaft.

Three weeks had passed since Jinx had jumped the train near Manifest, but for him, it seemed a lifetime. He had come to a community where strangers arrived every day, from places farther away than the next state over. He knew he might be fooling himself into thinking that he could stay. That he could leave his past behind. But he’d met Ned and was living with Shady. He was going to school. Leading a normal life. And for now, he felt safe.

The shaft elevator strained and heaved its way slowly out of the ground. A tall wooden shack housed the cage elevator, which carried miners one to two hundred feet
underground, where they would disperse into various dugouts called rooms, each supported by a single wooden pillar. Here the miners worked their eight-hour shifts, picking out the coal, loading it into a cart, and hauling it back out.