Elemental Masters - Jolene E-Book

Mercedes Lackey

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Anna May Jones is the daughter of a coal miner. When her father succumbs to Black Lung, the coal company wastes no time in turning the family out of their home. In desperation, Anna May's mother sends her to live with her Aunt Jinny, a witchy-woman and an Elemental Master, in a holler outside of Ducktown. As she settles into her new life, Anna May finds herself falling for a stonemason with such a talent for stonecarving that people come all the way from Memphis to commission statues and tombstones from him. But he's not content with his current skill--he wants to learn to carve stone so well it looks real.When the stonemason disappears on a quest to fulfill his ambition, it is up to Anna May to follow and find him, armed with the new abilities Aunt Jinny has taught her.To save the man she loves, Anna May must journey into the mountain--and confront the horrors that lurk in the darkness of the mine.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Available now from Mercedes Lackey and Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

About the Author

JOLENE

The

ELEMENTAL

MASTERS

Available now from Mercedes Lackey and Titan Books

THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES

Foundation

Intrigues

Changes

Redoubt

Bastion

THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

The Serpent’s Shadow

The Gates of Sleep

Phoenix and Ashes

The Wizard of London

Reserved for the Cat

Unnatural Issue

Home from the Sea

Steadfast

Blood Red

From a High Tower

A Study in Sable

A Scandal in Battersea

The Bartered Brides

The Case of the Spellbound Child

THE HERALD SPY

Closer to Home

Closer to the Heart

Closer to the Chest

FAMILY SPIES

The Hills Have Spies

Eye Spy

Spy, Spy Again

VALDEMAR OMNIBUSES

The Heralds of Valdemar

The Mage Winds

The Mage Storms

The Mage Wars

The Last Herald Mage

Vows & Honor

Exiles of Valdemar

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Jolene

Paperback edition ISBN: 9781789093759

Ebook edition ISBN: 9781789093766

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: December 2020

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Mercedes Lackey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Copyright © 2020 by Mercedes R. Lackey. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To the Memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is set in Tennessee, in around 1890. As such it contains characters whose attitudes, language, and behavior reflect harmful ideologies that were prevalent in that place and time, including racism, anti-Native sentiment, and other forms of bigotry. Readers who are sensitive to depictions of these things are encouraged to read with caution.

1

The sun shone thinly through the ever-present smoke and dust above the coal-mining town of Soddy; it should have been warm, but Anna May huddled in Ma’s darned and discarded shawl as her hands busily shelled peas. She was almost always cold, except when other people were fanning themselves, opening their collars and complaining about the heat. From where Anna May sat on her Pa’s porch, if you raised your eyes above the roofs of the clapboard houses across the dirt street, and squinted just a little, the haze that never left the air of Soddy looked pretty instead of dirty, and the hills and the tops of the trees outside of town were like something in a dream.

She didn’t dare daydream, because Ma would be after them peas before too long. She druther look at the trees just past the roofs of town, concentrate on shelling, and try not to listen to Ma and Pa inside, argumentin’.

Ma had set her to shelling the peas she’d picked out of the garden, and told her to go out on the porch to do it. She knew what that meant. It meant Ma was going to have something to say to Pa as soon as he got back from the coal mine, and she didn’t want Anna to hear what it was.

That was what she always did whenever she wanted to give Pa a piece of her mind. The two-room house was too small for anyone to keep anything private. The bedroom in the back barely had room enough for Ma and Pa’s bed, the washstand, and the clothes chest, and when Anna’s narrow trundle under the big iron bedstead was pulled out for sleeping, there was hardly room for a mouse to pass. And the main room was just as cramped, what with the deal table, the three stools, the iron sink, the cupboard for the food, two mismatched chairs at the hearthside, and the cast-iron cookstove. She supposed the cookstove was a blessing, though it took up so much room and needed such careful tending. All the Company-built cabins had cast-iron stoves; people didn’t burn wood ’round here, they burned waste coal, and the Company reckoned that what with coal soot building up in the chimbleys faster than wood did, there was a bigger fire risk with an open hearth than with a coal stove. After all, the Company didn’t want its investments burning down.

There wasn’t much at all pleasing to look at here in Soddy itself. This dirt street they were on was all Company houses, clapboard two-room Company-built cabins all alike, all originally whitewashed, all of them gray and dingy with the soot that came out of the coke ovens. That soot was everywhere, and it was worse in winter, when everyone stoked their little coal fires (in freehold cabins) or coal stoves (in the Company houses) all day long and most of the night. Soot and coal smuts were just a part of life in Soddy. You couldn’t never get anything clean, or at least, it didn’t stay clean for long, no matter how hard you tried. Wash left hanging out was gray by the time it was dry, even if you bleached it until your hands burned, iffen you could afford the bleach. Even if you could afford to whitewash your house every spring, by early summer it was gray again. Folks coughed and sneezed a lot, but the Company said all that coughing was prosperity.

She tried not to breathe too deeply, because that always set off her coughing bad, but there weren’t nothing good here in town to smell anyway. Nobody that had a garden wasted space and compost on flowers. And some people, naming no names, didn’t keep their privies as clean as Ma did.

She dreamed most nights of running out of town, down to the Lake, all the way to Soddy Crick, or just out to them trees, where things was green and there must be the wonderful scents of green grass and flowers, and she could walk in the grass or paddle in the Lake’s edge. She’d never in her life done that, even though them woods was only a few streets away. When she was little and couldn’t help around the house and garden, Ma had tied her to the table to keep her from toddling off or touching the hot stove. Maybe Ma had done that because she’d tried to run off to the woods even back then, when she couldn’t get down the porch steps without crawlin’ down ’em; she obviously couldn’t remember. But as soon as she was old enough to hold a rag, Ma had put her to work, like every other kid in Soddy was, as soon as they was old enough. It was only once there were more kids in your family than there were chores that anyone got to play, and Anna was the only child in her family.

Not that there were store-bought toys to play with, but you could make toys easy enough, like corn dollies and corn horses out of shucks, and if you had a knife you could carve out whistles and all manner of clever things, and if you were careful they could last for months or even a year. And there were games you could play without much but a stick or a piece of rope, or a pocketful of conkers. Boys could always fish, and that wasn’t considered playing, that was putting food on the table, even when it was sham-fishing with nothing on the end of your line, not even a hook. As a young’un, she’d often looked up wistfully from scrubbing the porch or weeding the garden to see other kids playing tag or skipping rope, or trudging toward the Lake or the Crick with poles over their shoulders, wishing she could be one of them. Especially if she’d been a boy. If she’d been a boy, there wouldn’t be no house-chores to speak of, maybe weeding or hauling waste-coal, whitewashing the fence, but no cleaning and cooking. She’d have been one of them boys with a pole and a pail of worms, off for a day of freedom.

But Anna was the only one in her family to take on chores, and she was proper obedient. She’d always tried to do what she was told. So even as a little bitty mite, she’d done chores from the moment she woke up until after supper, when Ma would teach her letters and numbers until bed. There was a school, but Ma said she couldn’t be spared, and nobody in Soddy that mattered cared if someone’s Ma and Pa kept them out of school, ’cause so many households needed their kids to work. So even before she’d gotten so puny, she’d never got to run off to the woods and the water like some of the others did whenever they got a spare minute. Because Anna never had no spare minutes, Ma saw to that. Not even on Sunday. Sunday was for Service in the morning, then Sunday school, then Sunday dinner and wash-up, then Bible reading, then Service before supper, then supper, then prayer after supper until bed. Well, for her and Ma. Pa used to vanish after the morning service; now he just went to lay down and Ma couldn’t budge him except to eat—unless he felt good enough to go throw a line into Soddy Crick himself. Ma said that was sinful; Pa said that Jesus produced loaves and fishes on a Sunday, so there was no reason why he couldn’t produce some fish.

And now, of course, even if she didn’t have chores from morning till night, she’d never get as far as the woods, much less the Lake or the Crick, as tuckered out as she got, so quick.

So she just tried to imagine what the woods might be like, and did her best not to think about the fact that she was surrounded by Company houses full of tired, shabby people like her, in this tired old coal town, where the Company owned everything but your soul and every house on every street was the same till you got to the part of town where the few good houses were, for the bosses and suchlike, or the part where the freehold shanties were.

The only difference from house to house was what kind of chair, if any, you had on the front porch, and how many people got crammed into the two rooms. And if you were really pressed for space and could find or buy some boards, you could cram all the kids into a loft you could build across the rafters. Anna knew that compared to most here, their living arrangements were spacious, with her sharing the bedroom only with Ma and Pa. There could be six or eight kids rammed into some of these places, the loft packed edge to edge with corn-shuck mattresses, with a granny or granpappy or two bedding down in the living area thrown in for good measure.

Her hands were busy shucking peas, while she tried to keep her mind on anything other than the urgent voices in the house behind her. Because they were talking about her. She dreaded the times when the talk came down to being about her. Because no matter how it started, it always, always came down to the fact of her poor health, her small size, her weakness, her coughing, and how Something Needed To Be Done.

Ain’t my fault I’m sickly. Not like I did this t’ m’self.

She actually could remember a time when she’d been healthy, able to take on any chore Ma set her, and always obedient like the Bible said to be. Plain cooking, cleaning, sewing, working in that sad excuse for a garden behind the house where the plants were always covered in soot—though at least the soot kept the bugs off. And the garden did produce enough to make sure that in summer they were never hungry.

It was when she turned womanly that she started sickening. Tired all the time, short of breath, coughing, little appetite and always nauseous. Just this spring, after the potions Aunt Jinny sent stopped doin’ much good, Ma insisted she be looked at, and they found the twenty-five cents to take her to the Company doctor. But that didn’t help. The Company doctor couldn’t find nothing wrong with her, ruling out consumption immediately. Just as well. The likes of them couldn’t afford sanitariums in Colorado or hot springs in Arkansas. Ma had thinned up her lips and looked angry as they left the doctor’s office; she’d plainly expected more for their two bits, which could have bought a lot of beans. Pa said, “She’ll grow out of it,” and that was an end to it as far as Pa was concerned.

Except she didn’t grow out of it, and that wasn’t an end to it. She didn’t get much worse, but she didn’t get better, neither, and now she was puny and thin, looking closer to twelve than sixteen, and there wasn’t much she could do for long without running out of breath, unless it involved sitting. So she could plant and weed but not hoe and water; sew and mend, but not clean or do the laundry. Do things like shucking peas, but not cook, unless it was stirring something while sitting down. All the “easy” chores, things Ma could do in a minute, and even then Anna took so long over them that sometimes Ma chased her off to do something else and finished the job herself.

“…if I’d had my way I’d’ve sent her to Jinny two years ago. That there doctor’s about as much use as a hound-dog that won’t hunt. He kills more people than he saves. A pure waste of two bits.”

Her throat closed up, and her chest got tight, and her cheeks burned with embarrassment. That was her mother, who’d raised her voice just enough that now Anna could hear her clearly. Ma did that, making it sound like something she’d pressed for was somehow someone else’s fault if it didn’t go well. So Pa could take it as he’d been the one to urge the doctor, or even that Anna herself had begged for it, and he’d probably misremember it as the second, and she would be the one that wasted a whole two bits.

And the “her” that was to be sent away, of course, was Anna. The “Jinny” was her aunt Jinny, someone Anna had never seen, but who was nevertheless a constant presence in this household. It was Jinny who sent regular basketfuls of “potions” that Ma sold or traded to folks in Soddy and even Daisy, who mostly couldn’t afford the Company doctor. It was Jinny who sent other potions that Ma gave to Pa and Anna, and something Ma called her “tea” that she didn’t share with anyone, but Anna suspected was a potion too. Jinny lived east, near to Ducktown, all alone, in a cabin that had belonged to her granny. And that was all Anna knew about her. Except that Pa never liked hearing about the woman, though he never complained about the extra pennies the potions brought in.

Pa coughed. She hated that cough. It wasn’t like her cough. It sounded like there was something deeply wrong with him—and she knew he didn’t seem as strong as he’d been only a couple of years ago. But Ma insisted he’d be all right, they just needed to find the right potion from Jinny…

But so far no potion he’d been made to drink had done him much good for long. And lots of other coal miners in Soddy got that cough too. And they, too, would get weaker and weaker, and then they wouldn’t be able to work, and then—well, usually as soon as the weather turned, they’d get the Winter Fever and it would carry them off. She was pretty sure Ma knew that too. And from Ma’s tone of voice, Anna reckoned she’d decided she wasn’t going to have two people she had to nursemaid on her hands.

And of course, there was another factor in her wanting to send Anna to that particular place. Other folks don’t have Aunt Jinny. She knew that was what Ma was thinking. That Jinny would have a better chance at making Anna better if the old lady got her hands directly on Anna. And even if Jinny couldn’t make her well, at least Anna would be out of the way and Ma could concentrate on saving Pa from the Miner’s Cough. And she knew Ma would fight anything, be it beast, man, or sickness, that got between her and her Lew.

“Girl belongs with her kin,” Pa said, after he finished coughing. “Not gallivantin’ around the hollers with a wild woman. She kin stay right here.”

“You allus say that,” Ma said crossly. “I dunno why you allus say that. There ain’t no good reason to keep her here. It ain’t as if you give the girl two hoots and a holler.”

Tears stung Anna’s eyes at that awful truth. Because it was true. Pa didn’t give a pin about her, because she weren’t the son he wanted. Maybe if she’d been strong, tall, and beautiful, like Sally Macray, with boys after her and willin’ to do just about any favor to her Pa if he’d give ’em leave to court her, he’d have given her some heed—but small, weak, and plain meant she was barely earning her keep in the household, she had no prospects of getting married and being off Pa’s hands, and she knew it. And so did Ma.

“Girl belongs with her kin, givin’ her ma help, like God intended,” Lew repeated, once the coughing fit had subsided. “And not with the likes of Jinny. Not with some crowin’ hen what lives all by her lonesome with no man jack to see she cleaves to Godly ways.”

Ma snorted in that way that meant yore a fine one to talk, Llewellyn Jones, with yore whisky and yore chaw, and the way y’all used ter stay up nights with yore friends, a-drinkin’ and a-yarnin’ afore y’all took sick. Thet’s prolly why, even with me a-prayin’ on my knees every Sunday, Jesus don’t heal y’all. But she didn’t say nothin’; that wasn’t her way. She’d just wait for you to get all uncomfortable and change the subject back to what she wanted to talk about.

But then Pa went too far. “And who knows what she’s up to with them potions. She’s probably a witch!”

“Wall, yore quick enough to drink them potions, an’ even quicker to take the money what comes from ’em!” Ma retorted. “An’ I know what I know, and I know thet Anna ain’t never gonna come ’round right here, but Jinny can make her right once she gets the gal under her roof. And Jinny herself invited her!” she added in triumph, and there was a crackle of paper—presumably Ma flourishing Aunt Jinny’s latest letter, which had come with the last batch of potions. Ma wrote to Jinny every time she returned the basket with orders for more potions, and Aunt Jinny allus wrote back when she sent the potions. They used soot-ink and brown paper the fatback came wrapped in, one writing on one side, the other returning on the blank side, grease-stains and all. “It’s right here! She says she wants Anna to come now, right now, while it’s summer and easy travel! And she got it all arranged in advance. It ain’t gonna cost us nothin’—Jinny’s a-takin’ care of all of that. So Anna’s goin’ to her, and there’s an end to it! And one less mouth to feed won’t come amiss, neither.”

Well Ma almost never went agin Pa’s wishes, but he knew better than to keep palaverin’ when she did. So he shut his mouth, and there was the clatter of cookery for a moment or two, twice as loud as normal ’cause Ma was still mad. And then Ma made as much of a stompin’ noise as she ever did, which weren’t much, and stomped out to the porch where Anna sat on the stoop.

“Y’all done with them peas?” she asked.

Anna held back her tears with an effort. “Yes, Ma,” Anna replied, and held the two bowls up to her, the one with the shelled peas and the other with the pods. You didn’t throw away nothin’ in the Jones house. Ma would make a soup out of the pods and that’d be what she and Ma ate for lunch, with cornbread, while Pa took a hunk of cornbread and some cold bacon and pickled slaw in his lunch bucket. Pa needed the extra food, and every scrap of meat they got went to him; every miner needed as much food and water as could be packed into their lunch buckets to keep up their strength. So Pa got a big breakfast, as big as Ma could manage, and a big lunch, and the lion’s share of what she made for supper. And Anna and Ma got the ends of everything, like thin soup made from pea-pods, and plain grits with just salt, and poke salad and potlikker from the greens. Pea-pod soup and a little bit of cornbread wouldn’t satisfy most folks, but Anna never had much appetite anyway, and the taste was all right. Better’n cabbage soup, which was all she got come winter.

“Come inside and read yore Bible until supper,” Ma ordered, which probably meant she was to show Pa she was a Godly girl, and Aunt Jinny wasn’t gonna corrupt her no matter how much of a Jezebel Aunt Jinny was. Although Anna couldn’t imagine how anyone who lived alone in the woods could be a Jezebel in the first place. Nor how, if she lived all by herself and was doing all the things you needed to do to keep body and soul together and making all them potions, she could ever find the time to be a Jezebel. Anna had a hazy idea of what it took to be the kind of woman that one could call a Jezebel, and it required an awful lot of time to make yourself pretty. It probably needed servants too, because you couldn’t stay lookin’ pretty if you was out weedin’ the garden or choppin’ wood.

Ma stared at her hard, which made her scramble to her feet, flushing painfully, aware that she had been wool-gathering again. She trotted into the house, obediently got the Bible she’d been given at Sunday School as a prize for memorizing the longest passage, and sat down with it on a little stool near the window, opening it at random, which you were supposed to do if you needed guidance. Which right now, she surely did. Because it seemed like Ma had arranged it, and Pa wasn’t going to fight it anymore, and she was being sent off to Aunt Jinny. She wasn’t sure if she wanted that or not.

But the first thing her eyes lit on when she let the pages fall open was a page of “begats,” which was no help at all.

* * *

Supper, which was cornbread, peas and carrots from the garden biled up together, and cabbage from the garden fried with a little fatback grease to give it more flavor, and a mess of poke salad, was extremely uncomfortable. Finally, Pa cleared his throat, and she alerted to him like a coon dog catching a scent. “Your Aunt Jinny done said y’all’s to come to her,” he said shortly. “Yore Ma thinks she can set y’all up. Y’all can come home when you’re stronger.”

And that was that. He went back to his food. Anna looked to Ma. Ma looked faintly triumphant. “We’ll pack up yore things ternight and y’all’ll leave in the mornin’,” she said. “The feller what brought the potions today will take y’all part-way, and another feller will get y’all the rest of the way. Jinny got it all arranged.”

Anna just sat there, stunned. She hadn’t even got her mind wrapped around the idea that she was being sent away—and now Ma said it would be tomorrow?

“Finish yore supper,” Ma said, sharply, as she continued to sit there with her fork in her numb hand. Mechanically, she obeyed, mashing peas and soft carrots with her fork and somehow getting them into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed, but it tasted like ashes.

She didn’t remember getting up to clear the plates like she always did, but somehow found herself drying while Ma washed, and Pa sat next to the cold fireplace in the one good chair. Ma was telling her how this was a grand thing, how Jinny would make her well again, and repeating herself a lot, and Anna May just let it all wash over her like rain she couldn’t get out of. Eventually Ma gave up, and sent her off to bed.

Like the other houses, this was a two-room “shotgun” house: bedroom in the back, kitchen and living area in the front. Anna plodded numbly into the bedroom, pulled off her dress and folded it neatly, leaving it on a stool. Then she washed up at the basin, pulled the narrow little trundle out from under Pa and Ma’s cast-iron bed, and crawled into it in her chemise and knickers. She was old enough for a corset … but like so many things, they couldn’t afford one. Ma still used the corset she’d got married in.

Ma was still talking, but now that Anna wasn’t there, she was saying different things. “Jinny was right. Anna bein’ so puny wouldn’t hev happened if we’d’a lived anywheres else.”

Pa snorted. “So I shoulda been a farmer like yore Pa? I ain’t got any idea of what end of a plow to hold. I’m a miner like my Pa was, and his Pa was in Wales, an’ that’s what I know. Where else is a miner supposed to work but a mine? Mining’s a good, honest living, and it’d been no better at the Burra Burra mine. No better pay, an’ ye cain’t even grow a blade’a grass there, let alone a garden.”

“It woulda been closer to Jinny. Close ’nuff we coulda lived with her. We wouldn’t owe nothin’ to the Company,” Ma countered. “We coulda saved the rent money we’s spendin’ now. ’Tween me an’ Jinny, we’d hev a garden wuth hevin’.”

“Fancy me and Jinny livin’ under the same roof! And her always lookin’ crosswise at me, like I cain’t provide for my own damn family!” Now Anna knew that her father was angry, because he never swore unless he was really angry. “Y’all didn’t have no complaints when I brung you here!”

“That was afore—”

“And this is now. I’m givin’ in ’bout Anna, even though I think it’s a load of heathen trash, like Jinny’s witchy potions, because it’s plain the girl ain’t no help to y’all no more, but I’ll be damned if I sit here with you naggin’ at me and let y’all tell me what a man should do to provi—” And that was when Pa broke into a fit of coughing, and Ma rushed to get him a drink of one of those potions and said soothing words, and apologized, and begged him to forgive her.

Anna would have loved to have heard Pa say “Anna’s staying,” rather than “It’s plain the girl ain’t no help no more.” But … that hadn’t happened. And wouldn’t happen. Pa had made up his mind, and when he did that, there was no changing it. And it appeared that her fate had been sealed. Her chest felt so tight now she could scarcely breathe, and her eyes burned.

She knelt and said her evening prayers, quick as quick, then pulled the quilt over her head as she had as a child to block out the rest of the world and pretend she was somewhere else, like King Solomon’s Palace, or with the Pharaoh’s daughter, because it would have been lovely to take care of little Baby Moses. Not that she had many ideas what those places looked like, but that was part of the fun of trying to imagine it. There had been a picture in her Bible of Pharaoh’s daughter finding Moses in the bulrushes, in which the Pharaoh’s daughter was wearing what looked like nothing more than a bit of cloth wrapped around her and tied at the waist, with a strange round collar-like necklace and a kind of scarf over her head, draped in stiff folds, but that didn’t give her any ideas about how the Pharaoh lived. As for King Solomon, there had been two pictures. All the one picture showed was a couple of big pillars and a throne with Solomon on it, draped in what looked like a lot of shawls, on top of what looked like a sort of loose bag-garment. And the other showed Solomon and a different Pharaoh’s daughter in the same get-ups, promenading in front of a bunch of girls playin’ harps and tambourines and dancin’, and all of them done up in the same sort of outfits.

The clothes seemed odd. But the pictures of Jesus and the Disciples and Mary all showed the same baggy things, and the Pastor called those things “robes,” and the Bible talked about “robes,” so that was probably what they all wore when they weren’t wading into the Nile after babies.

There was nothing to hint in the pictures about what the Palaces looked like. But there would be lots of gold, surely. And flowers, masses and masses of huge flowers. And the robes would probably be soft, like the best cloth at the Company store, and in beautiful colors, and with all kinds of fancy trim on them. There would be soft pillows everywhere, all made of velvet, and beds and chairs like clouds. And clear, clean skies without a hint of soot. And lots and lots of sweets to eat. Sweets were the one thing that she could work up a shade of appetite for.

She fell into the old daydream, of being the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, a queen in her own right and equal to Israel’s king. She’d be wrapped in a white robe with the middle pulled in tight with a wide gold belt to show how small her waist was, and there’d be gold trim on all the hems, and she’d have little gold slippers. And a big necklace of gold and pearls around her neck and gold bracelets on her arms. She imagined herself into that outfit, looking as tall and pretty as Sally, with her hair covered by one of the draped headdresses Pharaoh’s daughter had on in the picture. She imagined herself going through a big crowd of people, with those girls playing harps and tambourines and dancing in front of and behind her, walking on a carpet of flowers they threw down in front of her. With a whole town full of servants coming behind the dancing girls, and Solomon on his throne like in the picture, staring at her with all his eyes, because she was so beautiful. She imagined him coming down and handing her up the stairs his own self, and putting her in his golden throne with the velvet cushion on it, and little servant boys offering her trays of sweets.

The sweets were where her imagination really had to stretch, because the only time she ever saw anything sweet to eat was at the Methodist Independence Day Picnic and the Christmas Party for the miners’ children. So, gingerbread, probably. Peppermints and jaw-breakers and butterscotch to suck. Pie. Pretty squares of white-flour bread spread with honey and jam, bowls of strawberries and cherries and peaches—she’d never seen a fig or a pomegranate, but she guessed they were some kind of berry and apple, so she imagined a big, juicy raspberry the size of her thumb and an apple the color of gold. And nuts dipped in honey and rolled in sugar. She’d seen other sweets in the Company store, in the jars of candy behind the counter, so she imagined all of them too, though she didn’t know what they tasted like. And she imagined Solomon at her feet, looking up at her the way Ma looked at Pa.

And it worked to make her unhappiness go away, because just as she was imagining herself biting into a peach so sweet it made her tongue curl up with delight, she fell asleep.

* * *

She woke with Ma shaking her shoulder. It was just come sun-up. Thin light came in through the tiny window over Ma and Pa’s bed. She could tell by the silence in the house that Pa was already gone to the mine. And that hurt, hurt more than she expected, that he didn’t even wake her to say goodbye. Her chest went tight again.

“Jeb’ll be here in a right minute,” Ma was saying. “I got yore things all bundled up in my old shawl. Get dressed and get some breakfast into yore belly or it’ll be a long pull till lunch.”

She scrambled out of bed into morning air so cold and damp it made her shake, made a quick wash at the basin full of even colder water, and pulled on her dress and apron as Ma stood there impatiently tapping her foot. Ma didn’t even let her do her own hair; as soon as she took it out of its braids, Ma snatched the brush out of her hand and brushed it so roughly it brought tears to her eyes, then braided it in the two braids she hated, because it made her look like a child. As soon as she was decent, Ma all but shoved her into the kitchen, and plunked her down at the table, where there was a bowl of grits and a hunk of cornbread waiting for her, with some potlikker from the greens on the back of the stove to sop up with the cornbread. Ma didn’t even go back to the bedroom to pour out the wash-water or to make up the trundle; she just stood there, as if to make sure Anna ate quickly. It was much more than she usually ate, but with Ma staring daggers at her, she obediently took up her spoon and did her best. The grits had some bacon fat in them from cooking Pa’s lunch, which was a surprise. Usually all she ever got in her grits was salt. Maybe Ma was feeling a mite sorry for sending her off like this.

Or maybe not, given how Ma was staring at her.

When she’d gotten down as much as she could, Ma snatched the uneaten cornbread from the table, put it in a square of clean rag with another couple of pieces of cornbread, and tied it all up. And just at that moment, out there on the quiet street, she heard hoofbeats and the creak of a wooden wagon.

“There, that’ll be Jeb Sawyer,” Ma said. “Come on! No keepin’ him waitin’!” She picked up a bundle from the floor and shoved it into Anna’s right hand, and stuck the packet of cornbread into her left, and chivvied her out the door.

There was just a sliver of sun above the horizon, the damp air made her shiver, and in someone’s backyard a rooster crowed. There was a buckboard wagon with a black mule in the traces right outside the front door, with a weather-beaten man just getting down off the seat, a man with grizzled hair under a battered straw hat, wearing red longjohns with the sleeves rolled up, under a pair of faded jeans overalls. The man looked surprised to see that she was ready to go, but didn’t say anything other than “Mornin’, Missus Jones.”

“Mornin’, Jebediah,” Ma replied. “I wasn’t gonna make y’all wait around, I know y’all got a long way to go, and this’s a kindness.”

“I’m a-bein’ paid for my pains, Missus Jones,” the man reminded her mildly, and turned to Anna. He had kindly-looking brown eyes, and his face crinkled up when he smiled encouragingly at her. He took her bundles from her and stowed them under the wagon seat, then handed her up, climbing in and taking his seat beside her. He picked up the mule’s reins, but waited for Ma to say something to Anna.

“Y’all obey yore Aunt Jinny and read yore Bible,” was all Ma said.

“Yes, Ma,” Anna said, ducking her head.

“Don’t be no trouble. Aunt Jinny’ll have y’all right fixed up, but y’all gotta do ev’rthin’ she says, and do it exactly as she says, an’ no argumentin’ about it.” Ma looked as stern at her as the Pastor when he was preachin’ hellfire.

“Yes, Ma,” Anna repeated, shrinking in on herself, and feeling as low as a snake’s belly.

“And don’t you pay no heed to what yore Pa said about her. Jinny’s a Godly woman, for all she’s a strange one with strange ways. Never no finagling with Jinny. But she does things as she likes and she don’t cotton to no man comin’ into her life and a-bossin’ her around, and she and yore Pa got sideways of each other from the minute they met. She’s done forgave him, but he ain’t never gonna forgive no woman for bein’ uppity to ’im.” Ma softened just a little bit at that. “So you mind yore manners and don’t pick up Jinny’s ways.”

“No, Ma,” Anna agreed.

Ma turned her attention to the driver. “Thenkee again, Jeb. Safe journeys.”

Jeb took that as the signal to leave. He slapped the reins against the mule’s back. “Walk on, Daisy,” was all he said, and with a little lurch, the mule put the wagon in motion.

Anna looked back to wave goodbye, but all she saw was Ma’s back as she went back into the house. She swallowed down tears, and turned her attention to the road in front of her. Bad as she felt, she wasn’t going to cry in front of a stranger.

Anna had never ridden on a wagon before, and the sensation of sitting on something that was moving was extremely unsettling, and very quickly drove out every other feeling but borderline fear. She clutched both hands on the worn board seat and gritted her teeth. It seemed very high up here, and as the wagon lurched in the ruts of the dirt road, more than a little precarious and not a little scary.

But by the time they reached the edge of Soddy, where the Company houses ended, and the much more ramshackle shacks of those who had cobbled together their own “houses” out of boards and tarpaper began, the road smoothed out some, and she started to relax. The mule didn’t seem inclined to go any faster than a walk, Jeb didn’t seem inclined to urge her to, and Anna loosened her white-knuckle grip on the seat as her fear ebbed.

The transition from “Soddy” to “farms outside of Soddy” was abrupt. The shacks ended, the farm fields began, and already there were men and women out in the fields, either doing something with a mule dragging some sort of implement between the rows of growing plants while a man steered the thing, or with a man dragging the implement himself and a boy or a woman guiding it. Plow? Harrow? Hoe? She didn’t know. She didn’t know nothin’ about farming.

That must be cruel hard, she thought with astonishment, looking at the men dragging a plow their own selves. No wonder Pa was contemptuous of farming. At least he wasn’t being treated like a mere beast. Was he? She realized at that moment she didn’t know much about mining either. For all she knew, his foreman could be driving him as harder or harder than that man pulling that plow. Pa might be contemptuous of farming, but was mining really better?

But if you farm, at least you ain’t gonna starve … and you ain’t allus owing the Company more money than you got.

Jeb turned the mule onto a new road, going south and east, and soon they were driving along parallel to the Lake. For all that she had lived all her life within shouting distance of the Lake, this was the first time she had ever set eyes on it, and she tried not to gape at the expanse of water. Until now, the most water she had ever seen at one time was when Ma had the extra wood to heat water for everyone to have a bath in the old tin hip-bath—which normally lived next to the rain barrel, with both set to catch extra water so Ma didn’t have to go to the pump as often. Ma kept pieces of old rag stitched together over the tops of both to keep out the critters, the bugs, the leaves, and the soot. There was a pump shared by all the nearby houses where they otherwise had to get their water, which was why it was much more convenient to have the rain-water handy.

Wonder where Aunt Jinny gets her water? Does she have a crick nearby? Walking all the way to a crick in the winter to get pails of water would be a powerful lot of work. And cold. And she didn’t have shoon, so she’d have to wrap her feet in rags and straw and hope they didn’t freeze going to and fro. She hoped Aunt Jinny wasn’t going to expect her to do it. She wasn’t sure she could haul a half-full pail, much less two full ones.

Little wisps of fog floated over the surface of the Lake. It wasn’t exactly a Lake, it was more like a very, very wide part of Soddy Crick, because barges came up the Crick all the time, passing through the Crick and on, to take up the coal and coke from the mine at Soddy and the bigger one at Daisy, south of Soddy, and haul it down elsewhere to sell. The view was unexpectedly beautiful, with the sun just coming up and glinting off the ripples, and a passel of ducks floating on the current, and she found her heart going still for a moment at the sight. And suddenly, instead of smelling soot and smoke and someone’s dirty privy, she smelled—

Green. There was no other way to describe the scent, except as green. And clean water, and a hint of something sweet. Flowers? And she heard birds singing, which she could never do in town. The air felt clean on her face, and despite the morning being cold, the sun felt warmer than it ever did on her own porch.

She straightened up a little, and took in lungfuls of the lovely clean air, and somehow, didn’t cough.

And a little spark of hope sprang to life inside her.

Mebbe this ain’t gonna be bad.

2

The route they followed took several turnings, away from the Lake, across smaller cricks that she didn’t know the names for, but generally going more south than east, and through farm country. By this time, she’d managed to lose her sadness in something like excitement at all the things that were new to her. She’d never seen so much food growing before, and in her mind, she started to question Pa’s contempt for farmers even more. Of the people who were out there, there weren’t more than a couple out of dozens that were pulling a plow themselves. So mebbe the ones that were doing that were just bad farmers. It appeared to her that if you were farming, even if the harvest was poor, well, you didn’t owe nothin’, you just didn’t get much.

As for mining … well. Things had been better before Pa started coughing, but they had never been precisely good in her memory. The miners got paid by the weight of coal they brought out, and paid in Company scrip, which could only be used at the Company store— and how overpriced things were at the store was made evident by the difference between what Ma paid at the general store with the cash money she got from potions, and what she paid at the Company store in scrip. But the Company store did one thing the general store didn’t—it let you take things on account.

Which is why pert near ev’body allus runs a debt at the Company store …

She shook away these uncomfortable thoughts, and admired the green fields spread out around her, taking long breaths of air that somehow got deeper into her lungs than ever before. She hadn’t coughed once since they left Soddy! Most of the stuff out there in those farm fields she recognized; she knew corn and beans even at a distance, and squash was obvious from the rounds hanging on the vines. But other things were a mystery.

But all that corn! Even flint-corn was tasty when it was just milky, soft, and done as a roasted ear, and she longed to jump off the box and pick a couple of ears to have at lunch. But—that would be stealing, and that was breaking a Commandment. She couldn’t be tempted to do that, though the boys in Soddy boasted all the time out of the hearing of adults about how they’d sneak out after dark when they was supposed to be in bed and raid cornfields at night, and have themselves illicit corn feasts. A few ears of corn wasn’t worth the amount of praying for forgiveness you’d have to do, after a theft like that. At least, not as far as she was concerned.

They kept going mostly south and a bit east while the sun kept climbing up into the sky, and Anna watched everything going on around her with complete fascination. These were all things she had heard about, but never seen. The only cows and goats she had ever seen were in pictures; the only geese and ducks were the ones she spotted flying overhead when she was weeding.

Some few people in Soddy kept chickens, so of course she’d seen those, but her family had never been able to afford to do so.

So many animals out here! And wild ones! Rabbits froze beside the road as they passed, and squirrels ran across it, and she’d never seen either alive, only skinned and gutted and ready for the pot when Ma could trade potions for them. The same with ’possums; she was not prepared for how ugly and odd they were, and she only knew what they were by the bare tail. They were good in stew; some people said they were greasy, but in winter she positively craved the taste of fat.

As for the farms themselves, the more she saw, the more she envied the children out there in the fields, helping their Mas and Pas. Ma scrutinized every weed that got pulled up, on the chance it might be added to the poke salad she kept stewing on the back of the stove, the food of last resort when even the Company store wouldn’t give you a speck of flour on credit. And when Ma was watching, Heaven forbid you sneak so much as a single pea for yourself. As she squinted to see what was going on at them farmhouses, there was at least one girl younger than her, shelling peas on the porch as they passed, and Anna could tell that for every pea that made it into the pan, at least two were going into the little girl’s mouth. The freedom to eat as many peas as you wanted … she’d never had that. Every bit of food had to be accounted for and shared, with the lion’s share always going to Pa.

Every time they crossed a crick, there was at least one boy fishing it, or hunting for crawdads. Every farm, if it didn’t have a cow, at least had a goat, which meant milk and butter and maybe cheese. And all of them had chickens, which meant eggs, and when a hen got too old to lay—stewed chicken! She hadn’t had an egg in—forever. And she’d never tasted chicken. Well, maybe having to pull a plow your own self instead of having a mule or ox to do it was cruel hard … but wasn’t it made up for in all the good things you got to eat?

They passed a tangle of wild blackberry bushes standing between the road and a field of tall, leafy plants she didn’t recognize; she spotted the red and purple berries growing there, and it was all she could do not to beg Jeb to stop—

But then, he did. “I fancy a bite a’ fruit with lunch,” he said conversationally, as he got down off the bench and tied the mule’s reins to a young tree. “How ’bout y’all?”

“Yessir!” she said eagerly. “Please, sir!” And he laughed, and pulled an empty basket out from beneath the seat before helping her down.

“Lessee if we kin fill this quick,” he told her, and set to picking.

A few berries went into her mouth (to make up for the pain of being stuck by thorns), but most went into the basket. And most of the fruit was fully ripe, so it wasn’t too terribly long before the basket was, in fact, full.

It occurred to her that Jeb was treating her like a little girl, and not the woman-grown she was by her years. But right now—she didn’t care. Not if being treated like a little chile was going to get her this kind of treat.

“Mistuh Jebediah?” she asked, because she was dying to know. Was it some kind of green to eat? The leaves were enormous. She could scarcely imagine how someone would cook it—would they eat it raw? “What’s the stuff a-growin’ in the field on t’other side of the blackberries?”

He laughed and laughed. “That there’s ’baccy, young’un! Ain’t you never seen it afore?”

“Not a-growin’,” she admitted. The whole way, she’d seen field after field of the stuff, and wondered what it was. She knew enough about farming to know that this, and not corn, was a farmer’s cash crop. He grew corn for his family and his animals, but he grew ’baccy for money.

“Wall, there ’tis,” he said, and looked at the basket, which was almost overflowing. “Huh. Missy, most young’uns I know’d et more than they picked, but since y’all didn’t, I reckon we got us ’nuff fer dinner an’ supper too. We’ll stop at next crick we cross.”

He helped Anna back up on the seat, and picked up the reins. Daisy, who had been contentedly munching the weeds growing at the foot of the blackberry bushes around her bit, obediently picked up her head. “Walk on, Daisy,” Jeb ordered, and off they went again.

But before too long, they came to another small field of corn, with a farmer working in it, and he stopped her with a “whoa-up.” “Howdy, neighbor!” he hailed the stranger. “I got me a hankerin’ fer roastin’ ears. Y’all got any t’trade?”

The farmer straightened up from his hoeing and moved over to the road, as Anna sat quietly. “Reckon I do. What’s t’trade?”