Moon Over Manifest

Still, I’d been working up the nerve to ask her what the curse she’d laid on Mrs. Larkin was. The one that had left the county appraiser’s wife in a tizzy. Lettie and Ruthanne weren’t going to let it go until I found out.

“Um, m-ma’am?” I stuttered, not sure if she’d mind my having figured out she was the Hungarian woman in the story. Miss Sadie kept rocking. “That curse you popped on Mrs. Larkin?”

“Curse,” she scoffed. “You believe everything that is told to you. Curses? Spies?” I jumped at her mention of spies. How did she know about that? I’d never even mentioned the Rattler to her. She may not have a bead on the future, but Miss Sadie surely had second sight when it came to the present.

“The only curse that woman bore was her own ignorance,” Miss Sadie huffed.

“Well, what exactly did you say to her?”

“Ava grautz budel nocha mole.”

I cringed as she repeated the phrase.

“It is Gypsy. It means ‘May your life be as long as the hair on your chin.’ And if you do not get busy, I will put an equally devastating curse on you.”

I couldn’t help grinning as I took up a shovel. Digging a square of dirt, then pitching it to the side, I hoped Miss Sadie’s mood had lightened. It hadn’t.

“No,” she scolded. “You shovel like a disznó. A pig. You cannot toss the ground aside like an old rag. Then it will not help you later. Use a hoe, there by the shed.”

What kind of demon woman is she? I wondered as I gripped the hoe, scooping the dirt to one side and then the other, making a gully in the middle. That made me a bit cantankerous, because crazy as she was, I could see the sense in making a neat row of ground piled on each side to keep the moisture from running off. If ever the rain came.

But time wore on, and as the dirt mingled with the sweat on my body, I felt strangely comforted by the chunk, chunk, chunk

of the hoe digging into the ground. I let the rhythm of it take me back to many a dusty ride in a freight car with Gideon. The two of us, listening to the chunk, chunk, chunk of the track joints, lost in our own thoughts.

I continued with my list of what I knew about Gideon. He could start a campfire quicker than most. He always let out a contented breath after a first sip of coffee. And he liked to flip flapjacks high into the air.

I smiled at the thought, but a worried frown took over as I wondered what Gideon was doing right then. Maybe unloading twenty-pound sacks of flour from a boxcar. What if he’d been let go from his railroad job? Was he sidling his way into a diner, offering to work for food? He’d know that the man behind the cash box would turn him down, but on a good day, a man eating at the counter might buy him a sandwich and a cup of coffee. It always helped to have a little girl in tow. He needed me.

Or so I thought. What had changed? If there was ever a part of Gideon’s life that needed divining, it was this. Why had he sent me away? As Miss Sadie liked to say, I’d have to dig deeper.

It had only been a scratch on my leg the day Gideon had started turning in on himself. It was April 12. I remembered because it was Easter and the day after my twelfth birthday, just two months earlier. We were in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Shreveport Gospel Mission Church was having an Easter supper for anyone who would come and listen to the preacher’s sermon. The way he went on for two hours about sitting down to the Lord’s great banquet and eating manna from heaven, we had our hopes set a little on the high side. So when they ran us through the chow line for a bowl of watery onion soup and stale bread, it was a disappointment. One weathered old hobo told the preacher that if he wanted more pilgrims on that road to heaven, they should pave it with pork and beans instead of onion soup.

That night we hopped the Southern bound for St. Louis. We were both in a mood. Hungry and tired, I sat with my legs dangling out the boxcar, catching a breeze, when a tree branch caught me on the leg. It nearly flung me from the car but I managed to stay on. Still, it gave me a good gash on the leg and we had to find a doctor.

Chunking up the dirt in Miss Sadie’s yard, I could feel it grinding into the scar above my knee. The infection and fever had lasted three days. I didn’t remember much other than frightful dreams and sweating clear through my nightgown and sheets. And Gideon’s worried face beside my bed. When I finally came out of it, he looked at me like I was a different person from the little girl he’d known before. He kept saying I was growing up. I was becoming a young lady and other nonsense. I told him I hadn’t seen the branch coming and it was just a scratch, but I guess he figured it would be easier traveling without me along to get into trouble.

“He thinks it is his fault,” Miss Sadie said in her out-of-the-blue way.