I drank the last of my coffee, wincing at the bitterness of it. All the weeks of feeling like Gideon had abandoned me. Trying to catch glimpses of who my father was, to find even one footprint in this town that I could recognize as his. Now I realized that through Miss Sadie, I’d witnessed it all. And I did understand. Gideon hadn’t sent me away because he didn’t want me. Miss Sadie’s words came back to me. “Who would dream that one can love without being crushed under the weight of it?” Hot tears burned in my eyes. Being loved could be crushing too.
Shady rubbed his whiskers. “The thing is, none of us realized that we needed to hear our stories as much as you did. All those Remember Whens in the paper kind of reminded us of who we were and what brought us together.” He filled his own cup of coffee, letting the steam warm his face. “Having you here has given us a second chance.”
That made me feel warm inside. “Kind of a do-over?”
“Kind of a do-over.”
Shady, Miss Sadie, Hattie Mae. They’d all nurtured and cared for me, hoping that I’d take root in this place.
But I couldn’t help looking at the rough faces of the men sitting a respectful distance away. The Jungle. The valley of the shadow of death. Manifest. Gideon. Where did I belong? Where was home? I needed to go once again down the Path to Perdition.
The Shed
AUGUST 24, 1936
The sun was just coming up as I made my way back to Miss Sadie’s. I cut over the back fence and marched straight to the shed, knowing it would still be locked up tight. But I held the skeleton key. It hadn’t ever been mentioned in Miss Sadie’s stories, but in my mind, it had worked its way in on its own. I’d wondered before what skeletons this key was hiding. Well, there couldn’t be any more skeletons than in Miss Sadie’s shed.
The key fit into the door nice and easy, and with hardly a tug, the door swung open wide. The shed was there, waiting for me to come in. Waiting to reveal what had been hidden and festering for so long.
It was a normal garden shed with pruning shears, buckets, watering cans, and the accompanying assortment of cobwebs, dead bugs, and dust. But there were also ten or twelve jugs. This was where Jinx had stashed the extra elixir under lock and key. And he’d kept the key.
Up high on a shelf, there was a box. I took it down and lifted the lid. I pulled out pictures, grade cards, newspaper clippings, childhood drawings, and school papers. All mementos of a boy. A boy named Ned.
I took my time, absorbing the things Miss Sadie couldn’t bring herself to tell me. I walked into the house, and in the kitchen I fetched a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton balls. Then I found a sharp knife and heated it on the cookstove. Miss Sadie was sitting on the front porch, rocking, waiting for me.
“Are you ready?” I said.
“I am ready.”
Kneeling beside her, I held the hot blade to her wound and pierced it, letting all the pain flow out. I don’t recall if Miss Sadie told the rest of the story to me as I cleaned her wound, or if I told it to her through what I’d pieced together on my own. It doesn’t matter. All I know is that her story flowed in and out of mine. And you might say I divined the rest.
The Diviner
It is a story of a young Hungarian woman who comes from a family of diviners. And she has a son.
In her young life she has seen much of pain and suffering. She wants a better life for her son. She will go to America.
Her story is like thousands of others and yet her story is just that: her story. The woman and her son set off on a great journey. They cross the Atlantic Ocean on a big steamer and land at Ellis Island. There, with the huddled masses, she and her son are herded through cattle pens to be examined by doctors for sickness or disease.
In the din of different languages echoing in the room, she hears a voice behind her speaking words she understands. It is Gizi Vajda, a girl from her own village. They have not seen each other in years and here they end up together, in America. Or almost in America.
A doctor looks at their papers, then at the boy. Your name is Benedek, the doctor says.
The boy smiles at hearing his name. He holds out four fingers to tell the doctor how old he is. The doctor pats him on the head. A healthy one, he says, even though the boy does not understand. Then the doctor examines the mother. He checks her eyes. One is red and milky. He writes a T on her arm for trachoma, an eye infection. It is very contagious, so she will not be permitted to stay. She must return to the boat and sail back.
This cannot be. To have come all this way … It is just a cold in her eye. Nothing serious.
But her words are not understood. And her son, she cannot take him back on the boat. He is allowed to stay, so he does not get a return ticket, and she does not have enough money to buy one. Gizi says, I will keep him with me. I have a place to stay in New York. I will give you the address. When your eye is better, you will come back.
The young woman hugs her son, kisses him again and again, and, through her tears, says to be a good boy and she will come back. But how will you find me? he asks. She takes a locket from her neck. Inside is a compass. See? she says to him. This needle always points north. But in here, she says, pointing to her heart, I have a compass that always points to you. No matter where you are, I will find you.
She puts the locket around his neck and Gizi holds his hand while they wave goodbye.
The woman takes the long trip back to Europe. Her eye gets better and she works very hard to make enough money to take the boat ride again. This time she is allowed into America and goes to the place where Gizi is a seamstress for a rich family. But the maid who answers the door shakes her head. Gizi got very sick. She was in a hospital for three weeks and died.
But little Benedek. The boy who was with her? The maid shrugs. She doesn’t know where they took him.
For a whole year, the young woman walks the streets of New York. She knocks on doors of churches, orphanages, hospitals. No one can help her. No one has seen her son. Until, one day, she knocks on the door of the Orphanage of the Good Shepherd. Yes, they had a boy there. His name was Benedek. But he was put on an orphan train and sent west.
For many more months the woman’s search continues. As she goes farther west into America, she draws attention. People frown at her thick accent. They raise their eyebrows at her dark skin. She tells them she is from a family of diviners, a people who read the signs of land and water. But they do not understand. She is shunned and called a Gypsy and a fortune-teller. She asks about a boy and they hold their children behind them. Then she finds a little town in southeast Kansas called Manifest. And she finds her son.
But now little Benedek is seven years old. He has been adopted by Hadley Gillen, who owns a hardware store. The man loves the boy and the boy is happy. The child speaks their language as if he does not remember the one he heard as a baby.
If she reveals herself as his mother, she will bring shame on him. They will shun him the way she has been shunned. So what does she do? She does what a diviner does. She watches. She waits. She loves.
As people come to her for their palms to be read or their fortunes told, she puts on a show. She dresses the part. But what she gives them instead is the truth she observes and knows about them. To the young wife who comes in her grief over not being able to have a child, Miss Sadie gives herbs to calm her fears and open her womb. When the aging grandmother who grows forgetful and fears she is losing her mind comes to her, Miss Sadie, the diviner, comforts her. She pats her hand and tells her that the things she does remember, things from long ago, are as real as what happened yesterday.
But mostly, she watches, she waits, she loves.
Only one woman in the town takes note. Sees her pain. Recognizes the look of a mother watching her son, even from a distance. The nun who is also a midwife. She promises to keep the woman’s secret. But she provides her with grade cards, childhood drawings, school papers. She does her best to do what a midwife does. She helps the woman realize, in some small way, her motherh
ood. She helps the mother keep the promise she made in the peekaboo song she once sang to her son. Where is little boy hiding? Where did little boy go? Mama is always watching you. Where you are, Mama will always know.
But the woman, the mother, she watches, she waits, she loves. And she bears the weight of that love. She bears the loss of her son to war. She bears the story of Manifest. When everyone else is crushed by it, by the loss, the pain. When no one else can bear to remember. She is the keeper of the story. Until someone who needs to hear it comes along. When it will be time to make it known. To manifest. That’s what a diviner does.
Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
AUGUST 30, 1936
Over the following days, Lettie, Ruthanne, and I took long walks. They listened as I told them the whole story. About Jinx and Ned, and Miss Sadie, and Gideon. And me.
We talked about other things too. About how the town seemed to have come back to life. All the Remember When stories in the paper had folks talking about the way Manifest used to be. And all the fine memories they had. And how people used to take care of each other. There were tears too, but they seemed to be healing tears.
We talked about how Ivan DeVore, the postmaster, had finally worked up the nerve to ask Velma T. to the upcoming Second Annual Homecoming Celebration, being held eighteen years after the first one. She said she knew he’d been sending her those anonymous notes all those years, but it wasn’t a woman’s place to do the asking.
And the women were piecing together another quilt, only this time, instead of a victory quilt, it was a friendship quilt, and they asked Miss Sadie to make the center square. After all, it wasn’t her fault that a young boy’s first and only welding job had been to make her a gate with her family name, Redizon, at the top. Those letters that when poorly welded and a little warped, looked more like Perdition.
Mrs. Dawkins at the drugstore gave Lettie, Ruthanne, and me a dollar apiece for our idea of offering free ice-cold water to folks traveling by on the highway. Once we put up the sign that read COME TO MANIFEST FOR FREE ICE-COLD WATER—IT WON’T CURE YOUR ILLS, BUT IT WILL QUENCH YOUR THIRST, the cars started rolling in. Most folks would drink their free ice water and shop a bit before moving on.
The strangest thing was how we found out that Mr. Underhill wasn’t the Rattler after all. Oh, he was the one who’d written the note, all right, and he’d tacked it to our tree. He’d seen us watching him in the cemetery that first day when he was measuring out a burial plot. Turned out he’d been cheating folks for years, shorting their coffins and burial plots by six inches to a foot while charging full price. But when he heard we were on a spy hunt, he got real worried. He had been kind of a spy after all. He thought we’d found out that he was the one who’d fed Devlin and Burton information during the fake quarantine. The past week, Hattie Mae had walked into the Better Days Funeral Parlor and said, “Mr. Underhill, you’ve got some explaining to do.” He must have been on pins and needles for a long time, worried that somebody’d find out, because he broke down right then and there and confessed the whole thing.
He was a bit put out when Hattie Mae said she’d only come in to ask him where he got off calling her a hack reporter and had he or had he not started charging by the letter for engraving tombstones after the incident involving Emancipation Proclamation Nesch.
So the Rattler was still at large.
Remember When entries kept coming in. One surprising entry read
Remember the waterlogged victory quilt? Most people don’t know that it was dried and returned to Mrs. Eudora Larkin with a handwritten apology from Ned Gillen and his friend Jinx. They both signed their names in the middle square, right over President Wilson’s washed-out signature. It was a lovely gesture and that quilt has been on my divan all these years. But I’m passing it along to a young lady in the care of Shady Howard who has helped us remember who we are and where we come from.
Pearl Ann (Larkin) Hamilton
But it was Heck Carlson who won the Remember When contest. His entry read
Remember when Manifest seemed a place too far away to ever get back to? A place too good to be real. A place one was proud to call home. Remember? For those of us who made it home, let us always remember. And for those who didn’t come home, let us never forget.
But a question remained: where was my home? Lettie finally asked what we’d all been avoiding. “Abilene, what are you going to do?”
I hadn’t known for sure until I happened to take a closer look at the book I’d accidentally stolen from the high school and had yet to return. For weeks it had sat on my nightstand, apparently waiting patiently to be noticed. And then I noticed it. It was Moby Dick, the book Sister Redempta had mentioned when I’d quoted Gideon’s saying about home. The same quote Ned had written in his last letter. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
I paged through it for a while, looking for those words. I haven’t found them yet, as I’ve got about six hundred pages still to go. But I did find something else. The checkout card taped in the front of the book. There were names that went way back. There was one date stamp: September 12, 1917. Beside it, in a familiar hand, was the name Ned Gillen. And he must have read the whole thing, as he’d checked it out two more times after that.
But it was the next name that made my eyes well up. March 6, 1918—Gideon Tucker. I had found him. I’d found my daddy. And I would find him again.
The morning of August 30 came. It was overcast as the 9:22 chugged into the depot. Lettie and Ruthanne, one on each side of me, walked me to the train station. I wore a pretty lavender smock that Mrs. Evans had made for me out of an old dress that had belonged to her daughter, Margaret. Mrs. Evans said it complemented my auburn hair and hazel eyes. I didn’t even know my hair was auburn.
Lettie squeezed my hand. “Are you sure about this, Abilene?”
“I’m sure,” I said as the train hissed a steamy sigh. I held tight to my satchel that held the cigar box of mementos and letters.
“You sent him a telegram, didn’t you?” asked Ruthanne.
“I did. It was a little vague.”
“Then maybe we should all go back to Shady’s place,” Lettie pleaded.
One after another, travelers started to get off the train. Charlotte Hamilton, Miss Beauty Parlor, pranced her way down the steps and looked at me a little aghast. “Are you still here?”
I just smiled as her mother called from down the platform. I wasn’t too worried about Charlotte Hamilton, daughter of Pearl Ann Larkin Hamilton and granddaughter of Mrs. Eugene Larkin, and likely future president of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She came from good stock and she would come around.
Then it appeared that all who were getting off had gotten off. Ruthanne and Lettie looked at me, apparently not knowing what to say.
“Maybe he didn’t get the telegram,” said Ruthanne.
“That’s right. He’ll probably be on tomorrow’s train,” said Lettie.
“No. He won’t be on tomorrow’s train,” I said, staring off down the tracks in the direction the train had just come from. Then, as if those tracks were calling me, I took off running. I felt on solid ground again, hearing the rhythm of my feet pounding against each railroad tie. I made it clear past the shot-up Manifest town sign before I saw him. Anyone worth his salt knows it’s best to get a look at a place before it gets a look at you.
He was walking toward me, one railroad tie after another, as if he’d spent the whole summer getting back to me. He looked thin; his clothes hung a little baggy. I knew he’d gotten my telegram. It was probably not that convincing a con but I guess I was banking on the hope that he missed me. The truth is I wasn’t sure he would come. I knew he loved me and he’d only left me because he’d thought it was for the best. But for now he was here. Would he stay?
He walked toward me like a man in a desert, looking afraid that what he saw before him might be a mirage that would vanish when he got closer. I stepped up to him, closing the gap, and at last he knel
t down and took me in his arms. He held his face next to mine, and when he looked straight into my eyes with tears in his, I knew. And he knew. We were home.
I took his hand and in it was the crumpled-up telegram Ivan DeVore sent for me at no charge.
WESTERN UNION
TELEGRAPH SERVICE
DEAR GIDEON TUCKER STOP REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF THE GRAVE ILLNESS OF YOUR DAUGHTER ABILENE TUCKER STOP SHE’S PUTTING UP A BRAVE FIGHT BUT THE LUMBAGO HAS SET IN AND WE FEAR HER TIME IS NEAR DONE STOP HER LAST WORDS (SO FAR) ARE: HERMAN MELVILLE SHOULD STICK TO WRITING ABOUT BIG WHITE WHALES, BECAUSE TRUE PLACES ARE FOUND IN MANY PLACES, INCLUDING ON MAPS STOP WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW SO THAT YOU CAN COME TO MANIFEST AND PAY YOUR RESPECTS IN PERSON STOP WE WILL TRY TO KEEP HER ON ICE UNTIL YOUR SPEEDY ARRIVAL STOP GOOD LUCK AND GODSPEED STOP
The Rattler
AUGUST 31, 1936
I’ve been told that every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As Gideon and I sat for a spell, just the two of us, right there on the train tracks, I told him the story I’d needed to hear. And I knew he needed to hear it too, all the way to the end.
I gave him his box of mementos and watched as he fingered each one: the Wiggle King fishing lure, the silver dollar, the cork, little Eva’s nesting doll, and the skeleton key. These treasures that had sparked Miss Sadie’s stories and led me back to my daddy. Gideon’s eyes filled with tears when I gave him Ned’s letters, all in a neat bundle and tied with string. He said he’d like to read them one more time; then we would give them to Miss Sadie. It was what we both wanted.
We pieced together some things in the middle. The fact that the spy map wasn’t really a spy map at all. It was just Ned’s drawing of home, a place he wanted to remember.
Moon Over Manifest Page 25
