“Sure thing.” He smiled. “I hope you get your freedom, Honey.” Francis looked like he wanted to say more, but instead, he said, “Well, see ya later.” He pulled out a harmonica and wagged it at the deep blue sky. “Lucky children’s moon out today. I just made my wish.”
I looked up, couldn’t help wondering if it was the same as mine.
He tested a few notes on his harmonica and nodded goodbye, the lyrics of “Old Kentucky Moonlight” climbing up and sweetening the cool pine breezes as he strolled back over toward the Company store.
I remembered Papa playing it on his fiddle during summer evenings. A homesickness swept over me, making me reel, the desperation for my family a breathless ache to my soul, the worry that I’d go to prison and wouldn’t see my folk or Francis again for another five years struck me hard.
“Are you going to go out with him?” Pearl asked when I walked up to her.
I pressed a finger over my mouth and tapped, staring after him as he ambled across the road, his notes trembling up into the hills like a psalm yet fevered like fireflies drunk on summer dance.
“Is that a yes I see in your eyes, Honey?”
“It might be if I win the emancipation and my feet can stop double-crossing me every time I see him.” Cupping a hand over my eyes, I pointed upward. “Children’s moon is out today, Pearl. Make a wish.”
Devil John and Martha Hannah stood at the bottom of the courthouse steps. The moonshiner raised a flat palm, and I lifted up mine and he gripped it in his hand. “Mr. Morgan said to go on in and he’ll be along directly.” Martha Hanna hugged me.
Slowly we climbed to the top of the courthouse steps. I looked back down at the town and saw Sheriff Buckner crossing the street and froze when his hardening eyes met mine.
“Let’s hurry, Pearl.”
“Do you think he’ll start trouble?” Pearl saw him, and latched onto my arm, pulling us over to the doors.
“It can’t be good.”
Inside, I was surprised to find Alonzo waiting by the uniformed man at the desk. He hobbled over to my side looking dapper in spit-polished shoes.
I searched his clear, weak eyes and glanced down at his clothes. Alonzo wore a clean ready-made dress shirt, his life story bared to all in the two shirt pockets that were stuffed neatly, bulging with his glasses case, several pens, pencils, and banded slips of paper, a small tattered comb, tobacco, matchbooks, a handkerchief, and other things I couldn’t make out.
The old man’s britches had been pressed, and he was freshly shaven with a track of dried blood dotting his chin from a new razor.
“Honey, losing Auntie’s home like that, your home, well, it was bad. So hard, the stiffest whiskey or meanest rock-gut could no longer chase away the disgrace, my own loathing for myself. I had to give it up or die tryin’。 She’d want me here for ya. Iffin you’ll have me?”
Shocked, I finally uttered, “I’m glad you came, Alonzo.” And for some strange reason, I felt Retta near. I looked at him tenderly and pressed my fingers against his crooked, frayed tie, straightening it, then kissed his soap-scrubbed cheek, my heart warming, grateful to see his sober face, wishing Retta was here to witness it too.
With Pearl and Alonzo beside me, I untied my scarf, pulled it off my head and walked slowly inside past the telephone booths, the lawyers’ paper-soaked whispers biting at the wires, the hairs on the back of my neck raised, the stagnant whiffs of the tired, lonely, and desperate blanketing the dismal building.
A bailiff stood waiting inside the courtroom doors. Alonzo took a seat in the back behind the railing. Ahead, the Leslie County social worker sat at a table beside a man in a business suit.
I paused and leaned over close to Pearl’s ear. “Oh no, it’s Mrs. Wallace. She’s going to be mad that I tricked her over in Thousandsticks.”