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  Stella spit. Stood up, hands on hips. Summoned a yell. “Sunny! You don’t have to run!”

  She took a few steps into the building. “Did Motty talk to you about me?”

  Only the nearest pew was visible; the rest were waiting there in the dark. The air smelled smoky and faintly sweet, like the inside of a charred whiskey barrel. She scanned the room, willing her eyes to adjust. Where was the high window in the far wall? She ought to be able to make it out against the dark.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” Stella said. She moved forward, hands out, thankful the aisle between the pews she remembered was still there. Her toes found the edge of the platform. She froze, put out a hand. Was the floor open? If she took a step she could plummet.

  Stella knelt, reached out. Her fingers found a rough, stony surface. What the hell?

  She ran her hand across the pebbly surface. It was concrete. She crawled forward, hands out, waiting for her eyes to adjust. The entrance to the God’s cave had been sealed. When had Motty done this? It made no sense.

  A sound like a breath. Stella jerked her head up. High up on the wall behind the pulpit, a silhouette in the frame of the small window, crouched like a gargoyle.

  “Sunny?”

  The shape moved and pushed backward out of the window. Stella shouted, jumped to her feet.

  She ran toward the front of the chapel—and nearly collided with a tall figure walking in. A deep voice said, “Hey there, Little Star.”

  Abby! Stella grabbed his arm. “The girl—Sunny. She just jumped out of a ten-foot window.”

  “Yeah,” Abby said. “She does that.”

  3

  1933

  For that first month in the cove Stella carried the secret like a snake wound around her heart. She couldn’t speak to her grandmother about it, and she didn’t know if she could confide in the only other person on the farm, Abby Whitt, Motty’s hired man. He was the biggest man she’d ever met, twice the size of her pa, each naked bicep as wide as a ham. When he sweat he had to mop his bald head with a huge rag he kept in his back pocket.

  The old woman had ordered Abby to bolt a latch on the chapel door and hang a huge brass padlock on it. Stella was to never go near it, and Stella obeyed. Whatever was in that cave didn’t scare her, but her grandmother sure did.

  Motty had worked her like a mule. Stella raked hay behind Abby as he swung the scythe, fed the chickens, braved the terrifying hogs. She collected the eggs and filled the cistern and scrubbed the sheets and dug up potatoes. Every Wednesday and Saturday she swept and mopped the floors and dusted the house with a damp rag.

  She told herself she was as much a slave as Mrs. Shelby’s Eliza. Only two things kept her from running away to find Pa. One was the promise of fall, when she could start school—a small, country school, far from the multitude of yahoos in Chicago. The other was Abby.

  She’d attached herself to him like a burr on a dog, and whenever she was done with chores she followed him around the farm. Sometimes she’d catch him looking at her with a serious look, and then, seeing he’d been caught, he’d wink or laugh or widen his eyes, playing it off comic. She didn’t understand what that was about.

  One hot day he was getting into his beaten-down Model A and she climbed into the passenger seat without asking permission. “Where we going?” she asked.

  “Get out now. I’m helping some folks move house. You can’t come because we’ll be working.”

  “I can work. All my chores here is done.” Which was mostly true, and she kept arguing until he gave up and started the car. The engine roared when he hit the pedal. This old car flew, so much faster than Pa’s truck. But when they hit a rough spot it liked to have thrown her through the roof.

  Abby chuckled. “Heavy springs for heavy loads.” And for sure he was a big man, hardly fit behind that steering wheel. His shirt was half open, exposing a potbelly barely restrained by a white T-shirt. He pointed the car west, up a road she didn’t know. Then again, she’d hardly seen any of the cove.

  Stella asked, “You think I’ll ever run into a panther like Uncle Dan?”

  He grunted, kept driving. She didn’t let that put her off.

  “I never seen a panther,” she said.

  A front wheel dropped into a pothole and the car lurched toward the trees. Abby yelled, “Fuck me!” and yanked on the wheel.

  Ooh, Stella thought. That’s a good one.

  Abby straightened the car, slowed a bit. He glanced at her, looking chagrined. “You’re too young for those words.”

  “Am not.” She’d heard plenty of swears back home, though she’d never heard anyone say fuck me. It was practically polite, like offering to load the gun of the gangster robbing you.

  “Well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Motty I said that.”

  “Tick tock, close the lock, throw away the key.” Stella tossed it out the passenger window. “Now, what was it you was saying about panthers?”

  He squinted at her, weighing whether to go along with this blackmail. Finally he said, “You’d make a pretty snack.”

  “Not if I met Uncle Dan’s friend,” she said, egging him on.

  “Y’uns better beware up in them hills,” he said in his Uncle Dan voice, which came out like yuns bare bewaaare up ’n em hae’l. Stella laughed in delight. She’d never met Uncle Dan, but she was sure she’d recognize him by his voice, a slurry of vowels coming from so far back in his throat he sounded like he was shouting from a mile away. “Panthers, bears, bushwhackers—”

  “Bushwhackers!” A new word.

  “Oh lord yes,” he said in his normal voice. “Motty didn’t tell you about your great-great-granddad Russell Birch and those Carolina bushwhackers?”

  She was dying to hear. “Well, this was at the tail end of the war.” His voice carried easily over the wind noise. “The Rebel soldiers didn’t care much for people in the cove. You see, this part of Tennessee had voted to stay in the Union.” When the South started losing, he went on, renegade soldiers who were cut off from the main army would ride into the cove through North Carolina passes and steal cattle and take cove folks’ stores. Russell Birch organized a home guard made up of women, children, and old men, and they’d try to scare off the renegades with nothing but hunting rifles.

  “Like Long Tom,” Stella said. Russell’s famous rifle hung in the front room.

  “Just so.” The road had turned into not much more than a goat path, and he was going careful now.

  “And one night,” Abby said, “those bushwhackers decided they’d just murder Russell in his bed and solve that problem.” He nodded at the hill above the barn, in the direction of the chapel. “Came down at midnight, right about there.”

  “What happened?”

  “The next morning, Russell walked out and found their bodies all laid out in the yard. Four Rebel soldiers, stone-cold dead.”

  A squeak escaped her. “Who shot them?”

  “They weren’t shot. Not a mark on ’em.”

  “Then how?”

  “Well now—” He caught himself. Started again. “You ought to ask Motty about that.”

  “Motty won’t tell me nothing. She hates me.”

  “No she don’t. She’s just a tough old bird.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It ain’t my place. I told you what everybody knows. Motty may have her own story.”

  This infuriated her. “I already know. I saw it.”

  He looked over at her. “Saw what?”

  “I don’t know what to call it,” she said. “I saw it in the chapel. In that hole in the floor.”

  He looked back at the road. Said nothing. But she was used to men who refused to speak.

  “The first day I was here,” she said. “I walked to the chapel, and down those steps.” Abby kept his eyes on the windshield. “And somethi
ng came down out of the dark.”

  Abby braked the car, bowed up right in the middle of the road. The engine stuttered and died. “I was just telling a story,” Abby said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I’m not telling a story,” she said. “It was there in the room with me. I know that down to my bones.”

  “You tell Motty about this?”

  “She knows what I saw. She told me I wasn’t allowed in there. Why else would she have you put a lock on the door?”

  “Because it ain’t no play house. It’s a house of—it’s not for children to run around in.”

  Stella balled her fists. She’d finally shown someone her deadly secret, and he’d told her it wasn’t anything at all. He’d called her a liar.

  Abby put up his hands. “I take it back. Stand down, soldier.”

  But he was still playacting, and she would not accept his surrender. Then he said, “How about you drive?”

  A jolt went through her. “What now?”

  “It’s just a ways up the road.” She scooched onto his lap and gripped the wheel with both hands. Her legs were too short for the pedals. He started the car with a complicated series of gestures.

  “One more thing,” he said into her ear. “These people we’re going to help, the Ledbetters? They’re losing the only home they know, you understand?”

  “The park kicked them out because they don’t have a life lease like Motty.”

  “Not many do. So they’ve got their own sadness going on. They don’t need you telling stories.”

  I’ll tell who I want, she thought. And someday she’d find somebody who believed her.

  “Hit the gas,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  for the next few hours Stella wrapped up dishes in squares of burlap while Mrs. Ledbetter packed them into the trunk. The woman wasn’t weeping, but her face was all dead like she’d been awake for a week. She barely spoke. Didn’t even seem to notice all the colored spots on Stella’s skin. Mr. Ledbetter and his skinny son, however, did nothing but bark at each other. All morning they’d been ferrying furniture out of that two-story house to a big hay truck, and they would have been at it all day if Abby hadn’t shown up. He was a giant compared to them, fiercely strong, and he never took breaks. He even carried out their iron stove by himself—just hoisted it onto his back and held on to it with a belt across his chest. When it thunked onto the truck bed Mr. Ledbetter and his son hooted and clapped. Abby wiped the sweat from his gleaming forehead, went to his car, and came back with a jug. He took a long pull, then handed it to Mr. Ledbetter. He took a sip and grimaced, and Abby laughed.

  Mrs. Ledbetter gave Stella a long look. “So you’re staying in the cove and I’m leaving.”

  “Not for long. My daddy’s coming back when he finds work.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  Stella’s cheeks heated. Stella had never met Mrs. Ledbetter before today, but Motty said everybody was always into their business.

  “You stand up for yourself,” Mrs. Ledbetter said. “People looked down at your mama for leaving you, and she paid the cost. But that ain’t no shame on you.”

  Stella felt her eyes sting. Paid the cost? Did everybody in the cove think her mama deserved to die for her sins?

  Before she could find words to defend her mother, a black horse trotted into the yard, pulling a small black buggy.

  A tall man stepped down, and a boy a little older than Stella jumped out after him. The tall man shook Mr. Ledbetter’s hand and said, “This is a sad day, a sad day.”

  Abby quietly set the jug on the ground behind him.

  Mrs. Ledbetter came forward, and now, suddenly, there were tears in her eyes. “You didn’t have to come, Elder Rayburn. But I appreciate it, I surely do.”

  “And I will surely miss your singing voice,” the man said. “I hope you’ll be able to come back for a service or two. It would warm my heart.” The adults kept talking, and Stella gathered that he was pastor at the Primitive Baptist Church, and the Ledbetters were longtime members. The whole time they were talking, the man’s son was staring at Stella.

  Finally Elder Rayburn turned his attention to her. “You must be Motty’s granddaughter. Stella, is it? It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Stella looked at Abby and he nodded. She extended her hand and the elder’s bony hand wrapped hers like a bundle of sticks.

  “This is my son, Lincoln,” he said.

  “Hi.” He was still staring at her.

  Stella didn’t like it. She said, “Can I look at your horse?”

  “Why?” the boy asked.

  “Because it’s a horse.”

  Elder Rayburn said, “Show her Miss Jane, Lincoln.”

  Stella walked up to the animal. It watched her with big eyes. Then she touched its neck, marveling at its warmth. The horse dipped her head.

  The boy was staring at Stella again.

  “What’s your problem?” she asked him.

  The boy said, “I ain’t never seen somebody with skin like yours.”

  “And I never met a boy named after a car.”

  “I’m not named after a car!”

  “Sure you are. The car came first, and you were named after. That’s facts.”

  “I was named after Abraham Lincoln.”

  She looked at him. “Why didn’t they name you Abraham, then?” Before he could answer she said, “What’s your middle name, Log?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you get beat up at school? I thought hillbillies didn’t like Lincoln.”

  “He was our greatest president! The cove voted Union. We weren’t no slaveholders.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “We weren’t! Just ask my daddy. Lincoln was a great man.”

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll just call you Lunk.”

  He was shocked. Had no girl ever talked back to him? Then, suddenly, he laughed. “You’re something, Stella.”

  “We’re all something.” She put her cheek close to the horse’s neck. Breathed in.

  “You going to school in the fall?” the boy asked. “You’re my sister’s age. Do you know how to read?”

  “Of course I know how to read. Don’t be ignorant.”

  “Well, you’re living out there alone with Motty Birch.” Stella thought, What does that have to do with anything? Then he said, “How about arithmetic?”

  “Ask me one more stupid question,” Stella said, “and I’ll punch you in the nose.”

  The men finished loading the hay truck, and Elder Rayburn called for a prayer. Everybody closed their eyes, except Stella—and Abby. While the elder’s deep voice droned on, Abby slipped the jug into the floorboard of the truck. He was back in place by the time they said Amen.

  * * *

  —

  uncle hendrick and his family visited for the first time that late August. Stella had never been in the presence of such fancy people. Uncle Hendrick carried a beautiful green suitcase—a color she didn’t know leather could be. His blue suit was shot through with silver thread, and a silver bar yoked the wings of his collar and propped up the knot of a tie that was as vibrant and gaudy as a butterfly wing. She gawked at his black-and-white shoes and sheer socks.

  Compared to Uncle Hendrick, Aunt Ruth was plain as toast, a sharp-eyed woman in a cream frock who kept her eyes on her husband like a hunting dog waiting for the gun to go off. Their daughter, though, was a princess. Veronica. Blonde, curly-haired. Couldn’t have been more than five years old, but her gauzy lime-green dress was more expensive than anything Stella had ever owned. She sat beside her mother, kicking her little patent-leather shoes, sucking on a hard candy. No one had offered Stella candy.

  Uncle Hendrick gestured Stella forward. She stood in front of him, not sure where to put
her eyes. She wore her best dress, a thin cotton thing Pa had bought her last summer, with three flowers embroidered on it. Before the relatives had walked in with all their finery she’d been proud of it.

  Uncle Hendrick went down on one knee. “Hello there, Stella.” His voice was soft. He smelled like a barbershop. He put out his hands, asking for hers, and inspected her palms the way Motty had that first day.

  “Are you sure?” he asked Motty.

  “Lord almighty,” Motty said. “Raymond Wallace brought her here. You think he just grabbed some speckled orphan off the street?”

  He winced. “Now, Motty, I didn’t say—”

  “Look at her. Look at that skin. Tell me that ain’t Lena’s daughter.”

  Stella wanted to crawl away. She hated when someone pointed out the red blotches. And Uncle Hendrick was staring at her harder now, wouldn’t let go of her hands. After a terribly long time he said, “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t know how to answer that.

  Then he asked, “Do you know how special you are?”

  She didn’t know how to answer that, either. The little girl, Veronica, said, “I’m special.”

  “Yes, you are,” Aunt Ruth said.

  “I thought all was lost when Lena passed,” Uncle Hendrick said, as if he were talking to himself. “All lost.”

  Stella pulled her hands out of his. She could hear Mrs. Ledbetter’s voice in her ear.

  Hendrick said to Motty, “She hasn’t been inside yet, has she?”

  Inside. To Stella that meant only one thing.

  “She’s not ready yet,” Motty said. “I told you that. Not till she’s twelve at the earliest.”

  “We can’t wait that long,” he said. “It’s been years since Lena. Perhaps we can—”

  “Twelve, Hendrick. The age of accountability. I won’t have it otherwise.” Stella was thrilled to see Motty annoyed at someone besides her.

  “We can’t wait years, Motty. Who knows how many messages we’ll miss!”

  “Don’t cross me,” Motty said. “Don’t you even try.”