The Stills

by Jess Montgomery

  Then there’s Benjamin Russo, between Hildy and Mama.

  Lily ventures a glance at him, staring down at his plate. Lily’s heart clenches. The poor man probably wishes he were back in his rented room in Kinship. Benjamin’s invitation—and placement at the table—was by Mama’s design. Dear Lord—please don’t let Mama go on about how Lily really does have a soft feminine side. Mama will avoid the fact that Lily hunted the turkey currently on the table and chatter about the pies on the sideboard, and Lily’s old county fair blue ribbons—never mind that they’re gathering dust in the red bowl on the top of the pie safe, serving as a nest of sorts for her sheriff’s badge.

  Of course, Mama only wants what she thinks is best for Lily—but Lily still finds it amusing that Mama also thinks she’s being subtle when, truth be told, she’s campaigning just as hard for Lily to take an interest in Benjamin as she had for Lily to win the election last year—though Mama must know that no man would be interested in courting a woman in such an unusual job and Lily has no intentions of giving up her position, not for a man. Anyway, Benjamin’s likely to only be here for a few years. People who come from elsewhere usually soon find that alongside the alluring beauty of these rough-and-tumble hills and hollers are heart- and bone-breaking challenges aplenty. They do not stay.

  Lily’s eyes fill rapidly as she thinks of Daniel, tears refracting candlelight into stars from nights so long ago. Lily blinks hard, clears her throat, but still her voice is scratchy and too loud as she says, “Let’s say grace before dinner gets cold!”

  The room silences, and all eyes, even the children’s, turn to her.

  She looks across the table at Mama. They’d agreed that Lily would say grace, but from the way Mama’s gaze cradles her with empathy, Lily knows that Mama understands that Lily is feeling too shaky for the task.

  “Well then.” Mama looks at Benjamin and holds out her palm. “We hold hands when we pray in this family.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He takes her hand.

  “Children.” Mama’s inferred command brings the children rushing over from their table, inserting themselves among the adults.

  With the warmth of her children’s hands in hers, Lily’s heart loosens with gratitude. She presses her eyes closed as Mama’s voice sweeps over the table, soft and sweet as a warm breeze conjured up on this cold day. And as she prays—thankfulness for the food, for the people gathered, and for the memories of loved ones—Lily thinks of those dear beloved souls no longer with them on this earth.

  Her heart still yearns for Daniel, gone now just over two and a half years—both an eternity and a moment since his uncle Dr. Elias Ross came to her, with Daniel’s blood blooming so broadly on his shirt that his hat, trembling in his hand, couldn’t cover it, with the fateful words: Daniel’s been found.… At one time, it would have been unimaginable that Uncle Elias would not grace her Thanksgiving table. Even Daniel’s half brother, Luther, whom Lily had never liked, would have been welcome at her table—until Elias and Luther betrayed Daniel.

  Thanksgiving. Lily considers the term, as she might an unusual flower in the woods. It’s impossible to be thankful for what you have without being mindful of what you’ve lost.

  “Amen!” Mama declares.

  Lily hugs her children before sending them back to the children’s table. Then she declares, her voice firm and clear, “Let’s start the dishes around!”

  She starts slicing off the drumsticks—already claimed by Micah and Caleb Jr.—as voices rise and overlap and weave to fill the room, and hands pass dishes and fill plates.

  * * *

  After everyone is sated from the meal, Lily washes up dishes in the kitchen’s pump sink, while at the stove Mama tends to the turkey carcass, bringing it to a boil in the large stockpot along with carrots and celery and onions. It will take hours to render bone broth. Later, they’ll make egg noodles—a simple recipe of two good-size eggs to a scant cup of flour, mixed up into a dough, rolled thin, sliced, and left out on a towel on the kitchen worktable to dry. Lily’s done this alongside Mama for as long as she can recollect, and it’s a cherished tradition. In a few days, once the noodles are dry, they’ll make turkey noodle soup.

  Now Mama admonishes, “Lily, go on and tend to our friends.”

  “Our friends are tending to themselves well enough.” From the dining room come squeals as the children play hide-’n’-seek. All except poor Frankie—she’d had a coughing fit at the end of dinner and Marvena and Nana are upstairs in Jolene’s bedroom, tending to her with tea.

  Mama waves her hands at Lily. “Well then, a certain special guest.”

  Mama means Benjamin, of course. He’d been quiet but polite. Perhaps the raucous dinner—veering from companionable to tense and back again—was overwhelming. Lily knows nothing about Benjamin’s family—if he has one. Who are his people? Is it simply too far to travel—which made sense, Cleveland being a very long day’s drive even in a good Model T—or are there other reasons he shared his Thanksgiving with Lily’s family and friends?

  Near the end of dinner, Mama had offered to pour the perfectly legal accidentally fermented grape juice—and Hildy, Tom, Benjamin, and Lily had accepted enthusiastically, but Jurgis and Nana had gone quiet, while Marvena studiously avoided eye contact with Lily or Mama, as if the earlier moment of toasting one another were shameful. Why had Jurgis become so rigid? And why had fiercely independent Marvena fallen to his lead? A dull gray lull settled over the dinner, broken by Frankie’s coughing fit. Could it have been brought on by nerves?

  Now, as Lily finishes washing the gravy boat, Mama says, “Go on. See to all of our friends about that coffee.”

  In the dining room, Lily finds Hildy under the table with Jolene and the boys, giggling away at pretending they are living in a cabin and the white tablecloth is really heavy snow. Lily smiles at the joyous sounds.

  In the parlor, though, Lily’s smile fades. There, on one settee, are Tom and Benjamin, and across from them on the other are Jurgis and Alistair. Whereas Jurgis had been mainly quiet during dinner, now he is holding forth on his views on Prohibition.

  “The law exists for good reason!” Jurgis proclaims. “Mining is dangerous enough, without men showing up drunk—”

  “Often as not, men trying to numb the pain of their aching joints for one more day of ill-paid work—and company scrip at that!” Tom snaps. “You’re focusing on the wrong problem—”

  “And there’s what the Good Book says against drink—”

  “What, that Jesus turned water into wine? Or First Timothy: ‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine own infirmities.…’”

  “It means to rub a little wine on your stomach, not bolt it down,” Jurgis says.

  “That’s ridiculous!” Tom scowls, and Alistair scooches into the settee’s corner, probably wishing he was with the little kids rather than insisting he was old enough to join the grown men in the parlor—though to Lily’s view, neither Tom nor Jurgis was acting like a grown man.

  “Not according to Brother Stiles, where we’ve been going these last few months—”

  Benjamin clears his throat. Lily’s eyes are drawn to him as he says brightly, “Look! Lily’s joined us!”

  Coffee. Mama had told her to ask about coffee. At least that is a non-controversial beverage. Lily’d never seen anyone come to rough words or blows over it, at least.

  Before she can ask about coffee preferences, Jurgis jumps up. “C’mon, Lily. I reckon you must have an opinion.”

  “In the case of Prohibition, when I have encountered violations I have done my duty, as I was elected and sworn in to do.” Lily keeps her tone even and pragmatic. “It is not my job to have an opinion. It is my job to uphold the rule of law.”

  Lily catches herself glancing at Benjamin. His gaze glints with appreciation. Though it is for her wit and wisdom, heat creeps up her neck and face. Somehow, appreciation of her mind feels more intimate than any other kind.

  Lily fe
els someone moving behind her—Marvena. “I’ve got Frankie settled for now.” Marvena’s voice is ragged with worry. “Nana will stay with her—” She stops, alarmed by the palpable tension in the parlor.

  A hard, rapid knock at the front door makes all of them jump. Lily frowns; who would come calling on Thanksgiving Day? Another knock comes harder. Apparently, someone desperate for her help. Where the Bronwyn County Sheriff lives is not a secret.

  Lily rushes past the others, opens her front door.

  There, on the porch, are Dr. Goshen and Ruth Harkins. Lily almost didn’t recognize the girl, her youthful face at odds with the eyes of an old woman who has experienced too many losses, borne too many burdens, and yet knows with deeply resigned certainty that a greater measure of much more of both awaits. Dr. Goshen looks more than put out to be here with her and not in his own home at Thanksgiving.

  Beyond the unlikely pair on Lily’s porch, snow covers the sloping yard and frosts the limbs of maples, oaks, and pines on the edge of her property along Kinship Road.

  Whatever they’ve come for will pull her from her warm house. Her Model T, even with new tires, might get stuck, depending on where she’s expected to go in the rutted dark and deep nooks of Bronwyn County. She may need to hitch Daisy to the wagon. Take along her coal-oil lanterns. Her shotgun as well as her revolver. Call in deputies.

  She flicks her eyes back to her porch.

  Dr. Goshen clears his throat. “Ruth Harkins showed up on my doorstep about an hour ago. Said her father didn’t want to send for me—seems he doesn’t think too kindly of the treatment I’ve been giving Mrs. Harkins—but her mother thought otherwise. Their boy Zebediah is in a bad way. Alcohol poisoning of some sort. From what she’s described, I reckon he’s in a coma. Ruth here walked all the way into town. Says her brother told her, before he passed out yesterday, that he’d had a drink from Marvena Whitcomb Sacovech’s still. That he’d been working for her. Figured I’d find you, Sheriff Lily, to root out Mrs. Sacovech so she can tell me what went in her shine—so I can know if I can help the boy, or not. Lucky she’s here.”

  Lily looks back at Marvena, now in the doorway from the foyer to the parlor, still as a critter, trapped between Lily and the doctor and the girl, and the men in the parlor behind her.

  It can’t be true—Marvena had given up moonshining the year before when she took on an official job with the United Mine Workers—but Lily’s heart drops at Marvena’s face, turned stiff and pallid.

  CHAPTER 4

  FIONA

  Thursday, November 24, 1927

  2:50 p.m.

  The table settings are resplendent yet overbearing in Aunt Nell’s modest dining room: fine linens, silver place settings, gold-trimmed china, crystal goblets. Fiona hadn’t overseen packing a trunk full of their finest tableware. That must have been a task assigned to Klara.

  What had George been thinking, lugging all this here for a Thanksgiving dinner? Had he really eschewed the notion of dining from Aunt Nell’s ordinary tableware? Or did he honestly think that such showing off would impress Aunt Nell into selling her farm to George?

  But from her end of the table, Aunt Nell’s gaze flicks disdain from one piece of crystal to another. At dinner parties in the Cincinnati mansion, the mesmerizing sparkle of finery took Fiona’s breath away. From pride, yes. But also from reassurance that she was sequestered, at last, from the hurt and nastiness that life heaps on those less fortunate.

  Well, she’d smiled then until she’d caught George with another woman. Until he’d hit her for suggesting divorce.

  And yet Fiona almost smiles now at the ironic metaphor of the gleaming plates and tumblers being, literally, empty. There is not a speck of food on the table. George sits at the head of the table where Uncle Henry should have been, his right-hand man, Abe Miller, and Dr. Elias Ross on either side. Upon arrival, George gave her only a brusque kiss.

  Now, as Klara scrambles to reheat Thanksgiving dinner, George and Abe talk quietly over business, ignoring Aunt Nell glaring from the other end of the table. Luther Ross—Elias’s nephew who had rolled in from God-knows-where shortly before George—sits drinking from his ever-present flask.

  Fiona can’t bear to look at him. Her skin chafes as if with a rash at the feel of his gaze, crawling all over her. The first argument Fiona had with George—about a month before she caught him in bed with another woman—was over him bringing Luther and Elias into his employ. He proclaimed, Some of your hometown boys will be joining my operation, as if Elias, nearly seventy, and Luther, fifty, were young men. George either had forgotten—or never knew—that Luther, as the owner of Ross Mining, now bought out and run by another company, had been in charge of the Pinkerton hired guards who had fired into a crowd a few years ago, a stray bullet killing Martin. Fiona tried to tell him, but George had laughed off Fiona’s protests—as if Fiona has come into his life with no past, no history, no haunting emotions.

  Fiona stares at her crystal water glass, noting the coal-oil light glinting on its facets. As if resurrected by the glitter, a specific memory arises before Fiona, supplanting the farmhouse dining room—the memory that had buzzed at the back of her thoughts up at the cemetery when Aunt Nell suggested that George, with Elias’s help, had caused Uncle Henry’s death, that he hadn’t simply died from a stroke.

  George and Fiona’s wedding this past summer had been at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, attended only by George’s business associates, except for Fiona’s son, Leon. She hadn’t sent invitations to Aunt Nell and Uncle Henry, or to any of the women she’d known in Kinship.

  And yet, at the reception, Fiona found herself thinking of Lily Ross, of how Lily—with her pragmatic nature and own unconventional choices—was the one person from back home who might be the least likely to judge hers. Her reverie had been interrupted by Mrs. Eugenia Chantelle, the wife of one of George’s business associates, who’d stopped to congratulate her on her surprising coup. Fiona had stuttered some rambling reply, growing increasingly awkward as Eugenia pressed her lips together to hold back laughter, until even to Fiona’s ears her accent sounded flat-footed as she drew out her vowels over much. When Fiona responded to some now-forgotten question saying she “might could” do something or another, Eugenia finally burst out laughing as she sauntered away. Later, George asked Fiona why she looked crestfallen—Aren’t you enjoying your own wedding reception?—and Fiona confided the exchange. George smiled, told her not to worry—I’ll take care of it—and whirled her onto the dance floor.

  The next morning during breakfast in the hotel’s dining room, Eugenia nervously came to their table—her husband steering her by the elbow—and told Fiona that any time she was back in Chicago she’d love to go shopping or have tea, the offer delivered with a quivering voice. A thick dusting of tinted powder barely disguised the dark bruising on her cheekbone—and Fiona realized with a shock that George must have complained to Eugenia’s husband, who would have reassured George he’d get his wife to set things right.

  Fiona had been horrified at what she’d triggered. Then fascinated at her ability to trigger it with just a few stray words. Then, again, horrified, this time at her own fascination with her—though she hadn’t learned the term just yet—leverage.

  Less than a year later, she’d had to heavily apply powder to her own cheekbone for daring to suggest divorce. That was when she started seeking better leverage. And then she’d found out she was pregnant …

  “Fiona, are you all right?”

  Fiona jumps as the question snags her back to the moment.

  Elias’s eyes are wide with concern, dark pools in his long face, slack and weary, mimicking the “oh” of his partially open mouth. His panting breath is audible, and though his brow is sweaty, his face is pale.

  “Prob’ly just wishing George had gotten here a little earlier,” Luther says, his words slipping and slurring, the alcohol on his breath hitting Fiona even from across the table. He takes another sip from his ever-present flask.

 
Fiona looks at George, still chattering with Abe, even as Klara sweeps in from the kitchen, finally delivering platters of food. Klara looks at him adoringly, as one might at a precious son, but George doesn’t seem to notice her.

  Why her devotion? Surely not because they are distant cousins. Because she’s so well-appointed in his will? In any case, Klara does not look the least hurt that George ignores her.

  She knows how to be—well, whatever the opposite of restless is.

  Patient, perhaps.

  Fiona is not patient.

  She regards her husband: vulnerable flesh and bone, yes, but stolid, handsome enough even at age fifty-three, with thick black hair that would be unruly but for the pomade he always uses. George is overweight, pudgy even, but there is nothing soft or giving about him. His square jaw has a constant, uncompromising set.

  Now, as Klara recedes, leaving behind dishes and platters, George abruptly looks away from Abe, turning to Fiona as if he felt her gaze brushing his cheek, like an annoying prickle of a gnat daring to glance his skin. His dark eyes meet hers and she makes herself smile, puts her hand gently on his arm, hopes her touch soothes him. He does not like being interrupted—not even by an unsolicited gaze.

  “Dinner’s been served,” she says, willing her voice to remain steady. “I thought perhaps—a word of grace?”

  George’s gaze shackles her, for she dare not look away or let her smile drop. He gives a thin smile, looks across the table at Aunt Nell. “Well,” he says. “Since we are mere guests, that would not be my place.”

  Aunt Nell gives George a cold smile. “Oh, well then. I’ll be glad to offer grace—since, of course, my dear Henry isn’t here to do so.”

  George’s response is immediate, staunch: “May he rest in peace.”