Flower Moon

by Gina Linko

  Maybe that photo … maybe seeing his daughters together … maybe it hurt him.

  Maybe Aunt Grania and Mama’s blowup, their distance from each other, maybe it wasn’t just hurting Mama. It hurt Pa Charlie too. This thing with Aunt Grania and Mama, whatever was at the source of it, it had started between them, sure. But it had grown bigger than that and had darn near strangled the happiness right out of my Pa Charlie’s eyes.

  So instead of railing against all that was unfair in the world, instead of quizzing him on my mama, I gave my grandfather a break. “Pa Charlie, could you tell me what our grandmother was like?”

  He gave me a surprised look, all lifted eyebrows, but then he stroked his beard a bit in thought, a smile playing at his lips. “She was a lot like you, Tally Jo.” He got this kind of far-off look in his eyes. “Didn’t let me ever win an argument, but, lawdy, it was fun to try with her.” He stopped then, considering, as if he wasn’t sure he should go on. “I started this carnival because of her.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “It started as a dare. She dared me to start up Peachtree, because she knew it was my dream. I used to work as a hog butcher. Did you know that?”

  I shook my head.

  “It was hard, grueling work. Bore down on me too, year after year. Well, your granny, she used to tell me, ‘There’s one thing standing between you and your heart’s desire, and that one thing is fear.’” Pa Charlie harrumphed, his eyes looking faraway. “She was fearless. Just like you, Tally Jo.”

  “So, she gave you the nudge you needed to start up Peachtree?”

  “She sure did. And now I get to travel this great country, with my dearest family, and we have the privilege of doling out a few magical memories to the good working people in small-town America.”

  “Well, Peachtree certainly does that, and—”

  “Your granny’s probably why I keep the dratted Iron Witch around,” he went on, “even though it’s darn near ready for the boneyard. Your granny loved that ride.”

  “Did she?” I smiled, trying to picture that.

  “I’m getting nostalgic, Tally Jo. Never a good thing.” He chuckled and pinned me with his eyes. “You know she had a twin sister too.”

  I nodded, wanting him to go on. “So many generations of twin girls,” he said. “‘The Greenly Curse of too many beautiful women,’ your granny said when she gave birth to your mama and Grania.” He laughed then, his belly jiggling, his shoulders shaking. “Your grandmother was a handy kind of gal. She hand-stitched all of her own clothes. Mine too, as a matter of fact. That quilt you had on you at the campfire, she made that with her sister. They both quilted and knitted. Right talented, they were. They used to mail each other half-finished quilts, when they lived halfway across the country from each other. They’d start the pattern themselves and then send it to the other one to finish it,” Pa Charlie finished. His eyes slid away from me suddenly, and he coughed into his hand.

  “Pa, your lunch is ready!” Molly-Mae called from the Candy Wagon.

  Pa Charlie’s enormous middle growled a symphony then, as if on cue, and we both chuckled.

  There was that dancing jig, back in his eyes again. I smiled.

  “Go on,” I said. “Eat your lunch. I’ve got an entire catch-all to clean up.” I motioned to our mess. “And … by the way, I like thinking I am a little like Granny. I barely remember her.”

  “Thanks for letting me talk about her.” Pa Charlie got up from the table, rubbing at the small of his back.

  “Thanks for the photo, Pa.”

  On his way to the Candy Wagon, Pa Charlie pointed to the quilt under the old oak. Licorice was still sleeping there, curled up with her nose tucked under her paws. “You should pick up the quilt, Tally. Don’t let it get filthy on the ground. It’s too precious to me.”

  “Yes sir,” I said, looking at Granny’s quilt with new eyes. I walked over to it, and picked it up, dislodging a none-too-happy Licorice, who attacked my ankles in retribution. I shook out the quilt and began to fold it.

  Granny and her sister had made this, sending it back and forth, adding panels. Had they gone back and forth with it several times? One panel at a time, or more than that?

  They had lived far away from each other. What had Pa said? Halfway across the country.

  Separated.

  Hmm.

  I looked at the quilt more closely. Its geometric pattern had always seemed haphazard—the squares and hexagons, the little yellow triangles, all of it similar in each panel, but still a little different, no real rhyme or reason.

  But now I looked again—really looked. Each panel had a blue background made from squares of different calico patterns: flowers, curlicues, swirls, but all in shades of blue. Then, there were smaller yellow triangles mixed in intermittently. But the real star of each panel was the green shape. It was often in the center of the panel, but sometimes not.

  Then it hit me.

  These panels were not just geometric shapes.

  This quilt was not abstract and random. Not at all.

  The green shape of each panel was a hexagon, not a circle, so maybe that’s why I’d never made the leap before. But now—now I could see it so plainly, it made me wonder how in the jelly sandwich I hadn’t seen it before.

  The appliquéd hexagon, with its six sides, looked almost like a circle, but not quite. The first one started completely made of patches of light-green material. In the next panel it was the same, except a small sliver of the right side was made in darker green. As the panels went on, that dark green edged over the whole of the shape, overtook the entire hexagon, bit by bit. Like a circle getting shaded in, in small increments.

  I stared at the quilt for a good long time, barely registering Digger out of the corner of my eye pedaling into view on the unicycle. It’s like I was seeing its design for the first time. I mean, I’d snuggled into this quilt approximately seven million times. Slept under it, used it as a picnic blanket and as the roof of a card-table fort. I’d even thrown up on it once when I was seven, after a particularly rough ride on the Iron Witch, and there was a small, patched-up tear on the underside where I’d caught it on a chain-link fence near Macon.

  This quilt had been around forever. But now, I truly saw it for what it was.

  “Digger!” I called. “Come look!”

  I spread the quilt out on top of the picnic table now, ran my fingertips across the fancy cross-stitching around the hexagon appliqués. “What do you see?” I asked him.

  “What am I supposed to see?”

  “That right there.” I pointed to the hexagon in the first panel.

  “Look,” I told him. “What do you see, if you pay attention to the progression?” I pointed to the second panel of the quilt, then the third. Then I led him down to the second row, as if reading text on a page.

  “Huh,” Digger said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a gosh-darn moon, Tally Jo.”

  The moon. It was clear as day.

  “The quilt shows the phases of the moon,” I said, my mind boggled. “This here quilt is telling a story, from a sliver of a moon to the full moon.”

  “This is a clue, Tally. Seriously,” Digger said. “It’s gotta be. This shape matches the one in the note on the back of the silhouette.” Digger pointed. “That same shape. Think that’s a moon too?”

  “Yeah.”

  Licorice was now chewing a corner of the quilt and wrangling it between her teeth like it had just insulted her mother. “Shoo,” I said, pulling her off. “So Mama and Grania fought over … the moon? A tattoo of the moon?”

  “There’s more to it,” Digger said. “Everyone’s acting so tight-lipped. There’s gotta be more. This is big. Like … Godzilla big.”

  “My granny made this quilt with her sister. Her twin. There’s history here.” I felt a chill rush down the nape of my neck, as I rubbed the fabric between my fingers. “I think you could be right, Digger.” We were getting close to something. We really
were.

  Licorice tried for the quilt again, so I picked her up and placed her on my shoulder. She hopped onto Digger’s instead. She bit his earlobe and jumped down to the ground. Digger didn’t even notice, his brow knit over the quilt, studying it. He tapped at his bottom lip with his forefinger.

  “Hold up, I think I see steam coming out your ears. Don’t overdo it.” I chuckled then, but it was like Digger didn’t hear me.

  “The quilt is going from nothing to the full moon, right?” He pointed at the panels, and, for once, Digger didn’t joke.

  I got serious real quick. “Yeah? What are you thinking?”

  Digger continued, “You know, a long time ago, farmers, and probably other people too, told time by the moon.”

  “Okay, yeah, so this is like a calendar?”

  “Or almost like a … countdown.”

  “A countdown?”

  “Yeah, maybe from new moon to the full moon,” Digger guessed.

  “That could be.” A shiver went down the back of my neck again. “You still got your old phone, Digger?”

  “Yeah.” He produced it from his pocket.

  “When’s the next full moon?” I pictured the moon from last night. It had been a half-moon, or something close to it, golden and shining in the sky. The stars had been brighter than I was used to too. On St. Simons Island, everything seemed to shine a bit brighter.

  Digger tapped some things on the screen of his phone. “The moon will next be full on the thirteenth of this month. That’s next week. Maybe y’all are fixing to turn into werewolves or some such.”

  “Stop, Digger. Be serious.”

  “Right. Serious.” He gave me some kind of ridiculous salute. “Hey, your birthday is the thirteenth.”

  “Yep. Our golden birthday.”

  Digger was still looking at his phone. “It’s a Flower Moon this time, it says. Whatever that means.”

  “A Flower Moon?” I said.

  “A kind of supermoon, when it’s extra big in the sky for whatever reason. And really weird things happen at the Flower Moon.” Digger laughed. “It says here the lambs born during the Flower Moon are almost always twins. The crops are always bumper, which I think means extra good. And babies born are mostly left-handed. Huh.”

  Suddenly, a heavy feeling constricted my chest. This was no coincidence. At all.

  I pulled a breath into my lungs and they squeaked back at me.

  The next full moon was on our birthday.

  The Flower Moon, whatever that was. And I couldn’t explain why—I didn’t have words for it—but looking at my granny’s quilt, I understood that this was telling me her story, my mama’s story, and my story too.

  I didn’t yet know what that was.

  But I knew it was something big.

  11

  That evening on St. Simons Island began in a blur of flashing carnival lights and cotton-candy clouds—a gorgeous clear night, perfect weather for a carnival, and the crowd size reflected that. The crowd surged with the sunset, the lights of the midway attracting the carnival-goers like moths to a flame. They came in waves, starting with the kids about our age, loud and laughing, spending most of their time at the games: throwing darts at balloons, trying to knock the milk bottles down, and shooting water guns at animated targets.

  As the moon rose—edging toward three-quarters now—and the night settled in, more families showed up: harried-looking parents, squealing children, and lots of weekend cash. The petting zoo was a hit, and the kids especially loved our pups. We took in dollar after dollar inside the animal tent. First we charged a dollar for admission. Then we asked two bucks for a Ziploc baggie full of feed, and an extra fifty cents for a Milk-Bone if they wanted to feed the wolf pups. And we darn near ran out of both. Kids were right happy to get down and dirty with the animals. Pork Chop seemed to be in a mood. He even bit one kid who tried to pet him, but it wasn’t so bad. I bribed the boy quiet with a monstrous cloud of cotton candy.

  Like Pork Chop, I was agitated throughout the evening, hoping for a quiet moment when I could go find my sister and her newfangled booth. When, a little before eleven, the crowd in the animal tent finally began to wane, Digger and I sneaked out toward the midway, scanning the carnival for Tempest.

  I spotted her right away. She sat next to the strongman bell, not in a booth exactly, just at this rickety card table. She wasn’t one for fanfare. She had her usual gears and springs spread out in front of her, with some kind of makeshift sign taped up.

  Tempest: always a little left-of-center.

  “Come on,” I said. Digger looked about as worn-out as I felt, with hayseeds caught in his hair and a small gash on his cheek from a run-in with one of the ill-tempered turkeys.

  A couple of high schoolers were just leaving Tempest’s booth, shaking their heads, as we approached. The boy pulled on his baseball hat in a nervous fashion. “I can’t believe that chick. She knew my cell phone number. Well, most of it. That can’t be safe, can it?”

  Digger raised his eyebrows. “How is she rigging this?”

  I peered at Tempest’s makeshift booth. I shrugged, feeling that odd mix of irritation and worry toward Tempest as we approached her table. I registered a low-level thrum. That pressure was alive again between us. My heart sank. It was back—not bad, but enough. It made my teeth ache.

  I kept a safe distance.

  Tempest’s sign—hand-printed in purple marker—was all sorts of vague. It read I’LL GUESS YOUR NUMBER FOR A QUARTER.

  “Okay,” Digger said. “That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” But it’s Tempest, I added in my mind. And that meant it did make some kind of sense to me. Numbers—she’d always been good with numbers. They went hand in hand with her doodads.

  A Kool-Aid-mustached kid plopped his quarter down on the table in front of Tempest. Tempest eyed him up and down. Then she gave Digger and me a little wave. She had a weird gadget in her hands: what looked like a rejiggered compass, bearing the face of a tire pressure gauge, with three tiny, silver antennae sticking out of one edge. She fiddled with it nervously.

  I guessed it was her liar gauge.

  “Twenty-seven,” she announced firmly.

  “That don’t mean nothing to me,” the boy said, licking at his chapped red lips. I kind of wanted to yank on his ear, correct his grammar.

  “Think harder. It does.” Tempest’s voice was so confident. She blinked hard only once.

  The boy’s brow furrowed and he brought his finger up to his temple in a gesture of deep thought. Digger elbowed me, grinning, and this whole scene was just about to make me laugh out loud too. Except that it scared me a bit. What in the peanut butter and bananas was Tempest doing?

  And why did I feel like it was pulling her farther away from me?

  Suddenly, the boy’s eyes popped open. “You’re right!” He smiled brightly. “I can’t scarce believe it, but you’re right!” He turned on his heel then, and he took off toward the Candy Wagon.

  “Wait!” Digger and I called in unison. The boy turned back around.

  “What was twenty-seven?”

  “I won a cupcake-eating contest last month in my Cub Scout troop. I ate twenty-seven of them. Got myself a trophy.”

  Digger’s eyes met mine and we busted out laughing at the absurdity of it all. Tempest cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m trying to run my booth here.”

  She had her chin stuck out at an odd angle, like we’d somehow hurt her feelings. “How do you do this?” I asked her. “Is it just some kind of lucky guess or is it—”

  “Magic?” she finished for me.

  I nodded. Tempest shrugged. “It’s science before it’s explained, that’s all.” Then she went on, quieter, like maybe she shouldn’t. “Tally, you’ve got something too, you know.”

  “What? No I don’t.”

  “You do; you’re just scared.”

  “Tempest, stop it, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Tempest in a way
that made it quite clear that it was indeed not okay.

  “Okay,” I agreed, trying to end this conversation, my throat pinching tight. I didn’t have anything. And I didn’t want anything, either, if it meant that I was going to be like Tempest, completely absorbed in my own inventions, forgetting about my one true friend.

  A round-faced girl with a mess of red curls slapped her quarter down on Tempest’s table. “What if I tell you that you’re wrong, even though you guess it right? Then what?” she asked with a sneer.

  Tempest just shrugged. “I’ll know. I can tell if you’re lying.” She fingered the gadget on the table.

  The girl gave Tempest a scowl but handed over her quarter. Tempest ran her eyes up and down the girl, considering.

  “I see the number ten and the number twenty.”

  The girl pursed her lips. Then her eyes widened and she said, “It’s my birthday. Tenth month of the year—October—twentieth.”

  Tempest gave her an I-told-you-so look and the girl walked away in a huff.

  “Seriously. Whoa,” Digger said. “How do you—”

  “I don’t know yet. I can’t explain it.”

  “It’s gotta be some kind of trick, doesn’t it?” Digger offered. “Some kind of guess with odds and—”

  But I knew it wasn’t a trick. And it didn’t really have anything to do with her gadgets. Tempest had something, plain and simple.

  It was real.

  What Tempest was doing … it was something akin to magic. Not unlike what we used to have between us, how we couldn’t play hide-and-go-seek, how we sometimes knew what the other was thinking. That kind of thing, but bigger, stronger, scarier.

  Not exactly controllable.

  Like the strange pressure that uncoiled and bloomed between us now, erupting here and there with no warning. Waxing and waning with no real pattern to it.

  Yes. Just like that.

  Right then I heard a voice, and although I was still focused on Tempest’s liar gauge, there was something familiar about it. It tickled at the back of my mind. “I have a quarter.”

  “Tally,” Digger said.

  “What is it?” I said, watching the liar gauge, trying to figure out how in the creamed corn it worked.