The Witch of Tin Mountain(3)

I hear Abby before I see her.

“Dang it, Hortense! Come on!”

An angry mooing echoes over the hillside. Hortense is a cow. A temperamental, milk-poor Guernsey that Abby raised from a calf. If she were mine, she’d have been stew meat a long time ago.

I undo my braids as I walk, letting my hair spill down in waves over my back. I’m wearing my best dress—the one I made two years ago with daisy-print fabric from the Woolworth’s down in Fayetteville. I try to look as pretty as I can when I go to see Abby.

Up the hill, I spy her tugging on Hortense’s lead. She has on her work bibs, the patched denim straining over her curves.

“If you wait a minute, I’ll fetch Morris’s shotgun,” I holler. “We’ll have steak for dinner.”

Abby turns. The setting sun catches on her dark curls. Her lips widen into a grin. Ah, hell. That smile. “Gracelynn Doherty, quit your damn gawkin’ and come help me.”

I shrug off my bag and hang it on the fence post, relieved to be free of its weight. The mercantile was stocked full today. With what I earned from the morels, I got salt pork and three whole pounds of navy beans. There was even half a loaf of rye bread left from the weekly breadline.

I join Abby in the corral and take hold of Hortense’s leather bridle. The cow blows a huff of steamy air into my face and rolls her eyes. “Now you listen here, you bitchy old heifer, you’re gonna get in that barn and bed down for the night. Hear me?” I give the bridle a shake, and Hortense takes one measly step forward, her tail swishing like a mad cat, but she starts moving steadily, bony hips swaying from side to side. We tether her inside the barn, where she promptly lowers her head to chomp on the hay.

“She’s been more cross than usual. Ain’t givin’ any milk at all now,” Abby says.

“Animals act up when there’s something brewing.”

“Weather?”

I nod. “Maybe.”

Abby gives me a long, sweeping look. “You sure look nice. Go to town today?”

“Yep. Bledsoe’s bowels.”

“Again?”

“He won’t eat his damned prunes. Locked up tighter than the county jail.”

“At least his money’s good, ain’t it?” Abby shakes her head. “Come up the tower with me. I got some cigarettes. Pall Malls. Chocolate, too.” There’s a naughty quirk to her grin that makes me go all warm inside.

“Lands, Abby. That’s rich. You rob a bank?”

“No, but I can save a dime for somethin’ special now and then, just like you can.”

We pass through the back pasture, nodding with cow parsley, and top the hill, the shadow of the lighthouse long and narrow on the grass. It’s at least a hundred feet high and made of whitewashed field rock Abby’s great-great-granddaddy Hiram Cash quarried from the hillside, its peaked top crowned with copper shingles. High windows blink in the setting sun, reflecting the clouds and purple-tinged sky. It’s like something from a fairy tale—out of place compared to the dusty shantytown feel the rest of Tin Mountain has.

When I first came here five years ago, I thought it strange for a lighthouse to stand in the middle of a forest, hundreds of miles from any ocean. But compasses don’t work at all in these hills. They just spin and spin. Every now and again, teams of engineering students from the School of Mines come down to investigate and go back to Rolla scratching their heads and muttering about ley lines and magnetic fields, but no one really knows why Tin Mountain is the way it is.

If it weren’t for the lighthouse, people would get lost all the time. And when people get lost here, they don’t come back the same. If they come back at all.

We pass by the stone cottage that sits at the lighthouse’s base, and a wet, ragged cough comes through an open window.

“How’s your pa?” I ask.

“He’s been in bed for a week. Ain’t eatin’ much.”

“Any blood with his cough?”

“Nah. None I’ve seen. Yet.”

“I’ll tell Granny. Maybe she can get her hands on something more potent than elderberry syrup.”

A shadow slides across Abby’s round cheeks. “Ain’t nothin’ for it, Gracelynn.”

“Now, don’t say that.”

“I took him to a doctor up in Springfield. It’s tuberculosis.”

The taste of sour metal skates over my tongue. Me and Granny might have lots of cures, but there ain’t no cure for tuberculosis. Abby sniffs and turns away, but not before I see the hurt pooling in her eyes. She undoes the latch on the lighthouse door and bumps her hip against it. The door judders open, sweeping an arc of dirt in its path. Inside, spiraling steps twist upward into the darkness.

“I’ll get the lamp,” she says, her voice husky. “There’s matches in my back pocket if you’ll fetch ’em.”

My fingers dart into Abby’s pocket. I fish around for the box of matches and pull them free, my face heating at having touched her in such a close way. She holds the paraffin lantern steady while I light it, the sharp scent of sulfur sparking between us.

I follow her up the winding rockwork staircase, the cool walls growing close as we near the top. On the last step, she passes the lantern to me so she can push the hatch open with both hands. The hinges creak as the trapdoor falls back against the floor. Light floods into the tower, washing the steps gray. We emerge into an octagonal room, with glinting windows on all sides. Ever since her pa first took sick, the job of lighting and tending Old Liberty fell to Abby. She’s proud of the lighthouse and it shows. She spends every morning carefully polishing the windows and brass lantern fittings so Liberty will shine bright and true.