Read Online The Rosewood Casket by Sharyn McCrumb - Free Book Online Page A

their cousin Roy heading for the dog pen beside the barn. They pulled open the wooden door in the chicken wire fence, released the yelping hounds from the enclosure, and loaded them into the back of Sam Teague’s flatbed Ford. Watching them, Nora felt afraid, and it took her a moment to sort out why. It was the silence. The men performed the tasks without speaking, expressionless. They did not laugh and talk as they usually did when they went for the hounds, nor did they wave to the womenfolk on the porch. Even though they wore boots and brush clothes, Nora decided that they weren’t fixing to go hunting. It was too late in the day. She didn’t see any rifles. She looked up at her grandmother, who was also watching the men in a grim silence far removed from the usual good humor she showed to the departing hunters. Something was wrong about this day. Nora knew not to ask if she might go along. “Where are they going?”
    Grandma Flossie sighed. “They’re hunting a child, Nora,” she said. “A little girl is lost out on the mountain. They say she wandered off into the woods, and can’t find her way home again, so all the menfolk are going out with the dogs to look for her.”
    “What little girl?”
    “She was staying over at the Stargill farm. She was a little towheaded girl about as old as you, Nora. You haven’t seen her, have you?” Grandma Flossie spoke slowly to the child, and Nora understood that the question was meant two ways. Had Nora seen the little girl playing in the woods, and a second meaning, the secret between them—had little Nora seen anything that other folks weren’t likely to see? A black ribbon on a beehive, perhaps, or a mound of flowers at the church altar that didn’t turn out to be there after all when she tried to touch it. Such things had happened to Nora before, as they happened to Grandma Flossie, but nobody ever talked about these occurrences, not in the family, and never, ever to strangers. Sometimes grandmother and child would talk about things they saw, but Nora understood that this gift of Sight was a thing best kept to herself. It made folks uneasy to have a little girl seeing things that weren’t there—bad things, most of the time. The worst of it was that they would come to see these things, too, a few days or weeks later: a burned-out barn, a new grave, an empty cradle …
    Did you see anything?
    Nora shook her head.
    “It’s a sad thing to lose a child,” said Grandma Flossie.
    “Maybe Daddy and the dogs will bring her back safe.”
    “It’s past two days now,” said the old woman. She raised her hand for a solemn wave as the black truck seething with hounds eased its way past them. “Nights are cold out on the mountain in May.”
    “Are you telling the child about the lost youngun?” Nora’s mother stood at the screen door, frowning at the pair of them. “Now don’t go giving her nightmares! She’s moony enough as it is. She might think she’ll be taken off next.”
    “I’ll stay close,” Nora promised.
    Grandma Flossie turned to look at her daughter-in-law. “Nora will be all right,” she said.
    “Well, of course, she will,” said Nora’s mother. “She wouldn’t be fool enough to wander off in those woods. Besides, it isn’t as if Nora was a stray, like that poor youngun at Stargill’s, with her mother deserted by one man and dumped on his kinfolks’ doorstep by the next one. If it had been me, I’d have gone north with Ashe Stargill, babies or no, instead of having to eat humble pie on the farm with that mama of his. I know they didn’t take to Luray, but they had to accept her, on account of her having their grandson, and Ashe Stargill finally up and marrying her. But I can imagine how they feel about having the other one underfoot, with times as hard as they are now. I’m not casting blame, but I’ll bet there were sighs of relief when that girl youngun ran off. Probably knew she wasn’t wanted.”
    “Pray about it,” said