Moon Over Manifest (19 page)

“Callisto Matenopoulos. Your mother. Did she not work three jobs to provide you with the chance to make the same voyage?

“And, Nikolai Yezierska? What about your family? They had to make a choice. Which son will go to America and which son will be forced to join the army? Your older brother. He insists you go and he will stay, no?” There was a stunned silence. They hadn’t realized she knew so much about them.

“They sacrifice to send us here.” she continued. “And
for what? To live a dream of freedom and prosperity? Pah. They would be ashamed of us. What is it to defy the Devlin mine to those who have risked everything?”

Her words lingered. Those in the room who had remained unnamed looked into their own pasts—their own stories of coming to America.

Until a moment before, these people in Shady’s bar had thought they knew little of each other as they hunkered with their own kind in their own trenches. But with the Hungarian woman’s words, they suddenly recognized something in each other. They shared the same blood. Immigrant blood.

There was a long silence finally broken by Donal MacGregor.

“She’s right. They’ve pushed us ’round long enough. I say it’s time to do summat about it.”

Hadley observed the nods of agreement. “Okay. The question is, what?”

“Aye.” Donal rubbed his weathered chin. “They’ve got us over a barrel and they know it.”

“And what do the Scots do when they’re over a barrel?” asked Mr. Matenopoulos.

Donal’s face broke into a wide grin. “Before or after we drink what’s in it?”

There was relief in the laughter. Even Olaf and Greta Akkerson gave a chuckle.

“Well, even if we wanted to,” Hadley said, “I don’t think we’re going to be able to drink our way out of this one. We need money, and lots of it. Unfortunately, the only ones making any money are the mine owners and the bootleggers. No offense, Shady.”

“None taken.”

Jinx’s entire body was becoming one contorted knot. He stretched his leg ever so slightly and accidentally knocked over one of the whiskey bottles with a crash.

Everyone sat rigid and tension filled the room.

“What was that?” Mr. Matenopoulos asked.

Shady grabbed an empty glass. “Anyone want another round? Another cup of tea?”

Hadley Gillen stepped behind the bar, and after a quick examination, he removed the panel and hoisted Jinx from his hiding place, dislodging the wad of bills at the same time and sending them fluttering all over the bar top.

“You!” Mrs. Larkin cried out. “Velma, is this the hooligan who had access to your so-called elixir? More like the devil’s brew if you ask me. Is that the kind of thing you concoct in your chemistry class?”

“Calm down, Eudora,” Velma T. urged. “I admit there was a bit more kick in it than usual, but even you said it helped your fever and chills.”

“Helped me look a fool! The way those Temperance League ladies carry on, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Jinx gathered up his money and inched his way toward the door, mistakenly thinking he could slip out while the two women argued it out.

“Call the sheriff. Arrest that boy,” Mrs. Larkin ordered.

Donal MacGregor stuck out his foot to block Jinx’s escape. “Not so fast, lad.”

“He’s been a source of conniving and cajolery in this community long enough,” Mrs. Larkin continued. “Just look at his loot. Who knows how many other innocent people he’s hoodwinked into buying that snake oil. I insist that he be put under arrest.”

“Now hold on, Eudora,” said Hadley. He looked at Jinx, who had his money in hand. “You’d better have a seat, son, until we get this sorted out. And why don’t you hand over that money to Shady for the time being?”

Jinx placed the money on the bar and took a seat behind the counter next to Shady, his one sure ally in the room.

“We have bigger problems at hand,” Casimir Cybulskis said, resuming the discussion. “How to raise a thousand dollars without being noticed by Burton. It is impossible.”

The room erupted in a din of agreement. Then Shady had an idea. “From the look of things, the mine owners and bootleggers aren’t the only ones making money after all.” He fanned the stack of bills in front of him.

“What are you saying, Shady?” asked Hadley.

“I’m saying that this young man may have an idea that we would do well to listen to.”

“You’re not suggesting we take advice from a con artist?” Mrs. Larkin asked in horror.

“All I’m saying is drastic times call for drastic measures.”

All eyes looked to Jinx, and Jinx looked to Shady with a horror to match Mrs. Larkin’s.

“Hadley Gillen!” Mrs. Larkin protested.

The hardware store owner jumped, wondering how he’d been put in the position of judge and jury. “Well, now …” He scratched his head, straining for a solution to this predicament. Then Velma T. came to his rescue.

“It’s true that Jinx tampered with the elixir that caused Mrs. Larkin to be a little more … well, animated than usual. So it does appear that some restitution is in order.
Might I suggest that he do some manual labor for Mrs. Larkin? He can be quite industrious under the proper supervision.”

“That sounds like a fine idea. What say you, Eudora? Will a little restitution do the trick?”

“Well, Your Honor, I hardly think—”

“Settled.” Hadley tapped his glass on the table like a gavel. “Now, if we could get back to the subject at hand …”

All eyes returned to Jinx.

“Shady, I don’t think these folks want to hear from me,” Jinx whispered.

“Well, I’m sure Sheriff Dean would be more than eager to ask you a few questions,” Shady whispered back. “These folks are desperate. There’s no telling what they might do.”

Hadley Gillen looked at the worn faces all looking at Jinx. “Young man, this town is at a bit of an impasse. If you have any suggestion that might help, now would be the time to voice it.”

Jinx squirmed to his very core. He looked pleadingly at Shady to be relieved of this fix.

Little Eva, who had continued to carefully take apart each doll to remove a smaller one from inside, finally removed the tiniest doll, and tottered over to Jinx. “Matryoshka,” she said, naming the nesting doll. She handed the smiling doll to him as if this tiny memento embodied the hopes and fears of everyone in the room.

Jinx accepted the gift and the burden. He cleared his throat. “So,” he began haltingly, “you want to keep Devlin and Burton out of town for a month and make a thousand dollars?”

“That’s right,” Hadley answered for the group.

“Would that include keeping Sheriff Dean out of town?”

Hadley paused, studying Jinx. He seemed to sense the bargaining that was taking place. “I suppose it would.”

“Then I have an idea.”

There was a solidarity among the people in Shady’s bar that night, as one by one they emerged from their trenches and ventured into no-man’s-land.

I
’d read through so many news articles about the influenza that I’d started to feel achy and chilled myself. And in this July heat there was not a chill to be found. Then Ned’s letter went from sunny to sad so fast. That was when I knew I needed a break from looking at the past.

Lettie, Ruthanne, and me took turns jumping rope, the heat from the summer sun making sweat run down our backs. We all agreed we’d outgrown jumping rope, but Shady’d given me such a nice gift of a skipping rope, and when there’s nothing better to do, I guess you go back to what once felt good. Plus we were in no hurry to become ladies if that meant not getting to go frog hunting or wear overalls, or having to act all proper, like Charlotte Hamilton.

Besides, it was the day before the Fourth of July and we had to think of something to do. The only fireworks on
people’s minds were possible sparks from an outdoor fire that might make the whole dry town go up in smoke.

The playground was empty except for us and the dirt we churned up with our rhyming.

I said the rhymes but wasn’t really paying attention. Little Eva’s nesting doll nested itself in my mind and had taken its place on my bedside windowsill. I marveled at how each memento had made its way into Miss Sadie’s story. After all this time of working at her house, there was a comfort in knowing that I was connected to her stories. By those mementos I’d found under the floorboard—the Wiggle King lure, the Liberty Head silver dollar, Shady’s cork, and the tiny nesting doll—I was connected to this place and those people. The places and names on Ned’s map were familiar to me now.

And there was Jinx. I felt like I understood this boy who had lived life from one place to the next. This boy who was full of adventure. I held out hope that Gideon would be mentioned in one of Miss Sadie’s stories. But there was only one memento left. The skeleton key. I wished it would somehow lead me to Gideon. It was probably in this kind of wishing and hoping that I’d started imagining maybe I
had
found him. I imagined that Jinx and Gideon were the same person. That maybe it was my own daddy who had landed in this town and found a friend in Ned and made fireworks and blew up a water tower and had people who cared about
him. Maybe that was who Jinx was. It was in this imagining of him that I’d grown to love that boy from long ago.