Moon Over Manifest (32 page)

Mrs. Dawkins at the drugstore gave Lettie, Ruthanne, and me a dollar apiece for our idea of offering free ice-cold water to folks traveling by on the highway. Once we put up the sign that read
COME TO MANIFEST FOR FREE ICE-COLD WATER—IT WON’T CURE YOUR ILLS, BUT IT WILL QUENCH YOUR THIRST
, the cars started rolling in. Most folks would drink their free ice water and shop a bit before moving on.

The strangest thing was how we found out that Mr. Underhill wasn’t the Rattler after all. Oh, he was the one who’d written the note, all right, and he’d tacked it to our tree. He’d seen us watching him in the cemetery that first day when he was measuring out a burial plot. Turned out he’d been cheating folks for years, shorting their coffins and burial plots by six inches to a foot while charging full price. But when he heard we were on a spy hunt, he got real worried. He had been kind of a spy after all. He thought we’d found out that he was the one who’d fed Devlin and Burton information during the fake quarantine. The past week, Hattie Mae had walked into the Better Days Funeral Parlor and said, “Mr. Underhill, you’ve got some explaining to do.” He must have been on pins and needles for a long time, worried that somebody’d find out, because he broke down right then and there and confessed the whole thing.

He was a bit put out when Hattie Mae said she’d only come in to ask him where he got off calling her a hack
reporter and had he or had he not started charging by the letter for engraving tombstones after the incident involving Emancipation Proclamation Nesch.

So the Rattler was still at large.

Remember When entries kept coming in. One surprising entry read

But it was Heck Carlson who won the Remember When contest. His entry read

But a question remained: where was
my
home? Lettie finally asked what we’d all been avoiding. “Abilene, what are you going to do?”

I hadn’t known for sure until I happened to take a closer look at the book I’d accidentally stolen from the high school and had yet to return. For weeks it had sat on my nightstand, apparently waiting patiently to be noticed. And then I noticed it. It was
Moby Dick
, the book Sister Redempta had mentioned when I’d quoted Gideon’s saying about home. The same quote Ned had written in his last letter.
It is not down in any map; true places never are
.

I paged through it for a while, looking for those words. I haven’t found them yet, as I’ve got about six hundred pages still to go. But I did find something else. The checkout card taped in the front of the book. There were names that went way back. There was one date stamp: September 12, 1917. Beside it, in a familiar hand, was the name Ned Gillen. And he must have read the whole thing, as he’d checked it out two more times after that.

But it was the next name that made my eyes well up. March 6, 1918—Gideon Tucker. I had found him. I’d found my daddy. And I would find him again.

The morning of August 30 came. It was overcast as the 9:22 chugged into the depot. Lettie and Ruthanne, one on each side of me, walked me to the train station. I wore a pretty lavender smock that Mrs. Evans had made for me out of an old dress that had belonged to her daughter, Margaret. Mrs. Evans said it complemented my auburn hair and hazel eyes. I didn’t even know my hair was auburn.

Lettie squeezed my hand. “Are you sure about this, Abilene?”

“I’m sure,” I said as the train hissed a steamy sigh. I held tight to my satchel that held the cigar box of mementos and letters.

“You sent him a telegram, didn’t you?” asked Ruthanne.

“I did. It was a little vague.”

“Then maybe we should all go back to Shady’s place,” Lettie pleaded.

One after another, travelers started to get off the train. Charlotte Hamilton, Miss Beauty Parlor, pranced her way down the steps and looked at me a little aghast. “Are you still here?”

I just smiled as her mother called from down the platform. I wasn’t too worried about Charlotte Hamilton, daughter of Pearl Ann Larkin Hamilton and granddaughter of Mrs. Eugene Larkin, and likely future president of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She came from good stock and she would come around.

Then it appeared that all who were getting off had gotten off. Ruthanne and Lettie looked at me, apparently not knowing what to say.

“Maybe he didn’t get the telegram,” said Ruthanne.

“That’s right. He’ll probably be on tomorrow’s train,” said Lettie.

“No. He won’t be on tomorrow’s train,” I said, staring off down the tracks in the direction the train had just come from. Then, as if those tracks were calling me, I took off running. I felt on solid ground again, hearing the rhythm of my feet pounding against each railroad tie. I made it clear past the shot-up Manifest town sign before I saw him. Anyone worth his salt knows it’s best to get a look at a place before it gets a look at you.

He was walking toward me, one railroad tie after another, as if he’d spent the whole summer getting back to me. He looked thin; his clothes hung a little baggy. I knew he’d
gotten my telegram. It was probably not that convincing a con but I guess I was banking on the hope that he missed me. The truth is I wasn’t sure he would come. I knew he loved me and he’d only left me because he’d thought it was for the best. But for now he was here. Would he stay?

He walked toward me like a man in a desert, looking afraid that what he saw before him might be a mirage that would vanish when he got closer. I stepped up to him, closing the gap, and at last he knelt down and took me in his arms. He held his face next to mine, and when he looked straight into my eyes with tears in his, I knew. And he knew. We were home.

I took his hand and in it was the crumpled-up telegram Ivan DeVore sent for me at no charge.

I
’ve been told that every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As Gideon and I sat for a spell, just the two of us, right there on the train tracks, I told him the story I’d needed to hear. And I knew he needed to hear it too, all the way to the end.

I gave him his box of mementos and watched as he fingered each one: the Wiggle King fishing lure, the silver dollar, the cork, little Eva’s nesting doll, and the skeleton key. These treasures that had sparked Miss Sadie’s stories and led me back to my daddy. Gideon’s eyes filled with tears when I gave him Ned’s letters, all in a neat bundle and tied with string. He said he’d like to read them one more time; then we would give them to Miss Sadie. It was what we both wanted.

We pieced together some things in the middle. The fact that the spy map wasn’t really a spy map at all. It was just Ned’s drawing of home, a place he wanted to remember.

And I’d wondered for some time why Shady kept that bottle of whiskey right out in the open but never touched a drop of it. Gideon said it was because sometimes a man’s demons could creep up on him. He figured Shady would rather know where his demon was so he could keep an eye on him.

As for the Rattler? There
had been
a mysterious figure known as the Rattler, who had never really been a spy. Just a ghostly figure some would see walking the woods at night, a faint rattling sound accompanying the movement.

But one night had been different—the night Finn met up with Jinx. “Jinx” would be the way I’d always refer to my young father. There were several people in the woods that night. Jinx and Finn were having their argument. Uncle Louver was out setting his raccoon traps. And there was the mysterious shadowy figure that loomed from nowhere, accidentally frightening Finn into stepping in one of Uncle Louver’s traps. The fall landed his head on a rock so hard it killed him dead.

Gideon himself couldn’t shed any light on this mystery. But I could think of one person who would have been walking in the woods after being called to the Cybulskis house to help deliver a baby. And who might look a little ghostly at night dressed in her flowing black gown. And who rattles when she walks. Oh, I was sure Miss Sadie had done her part in tending Jinx’s wound. But a diviner’s jewelry jangles. A nun’s rosary beads rattle. It’s a universal.

With that, I knew I had my story I would turn in on the first day of school. And I formed the first line in my head as Gideon and I walked into town, past the sign with big blue letters:
MANIFEST … A TOWN WITH A PAST
.

Like many readers of historical fiction, I find it interesting to know what is fact and what is fiction. Sometimes what I find even more interesting is where the fact or fiction came from.

Manifest, Kansas
.
Moon Over Manifest
is a story that came from my family roots. The town of Manifest, although very real and vivid in my mind, is both fact and fiction. Manifest is based on the town of Frontenac, Kansas. Originally, I chose the town of Frontenac as the setting for my story because my grandparents were from that area of southeast Kansas. But in doing so, I stumbled upon a community that was rich in color and history.

I decided to change the name of the town to allow more flexibility in what I could include in it, but other than being a bit smaller and having fictional churches and schools, Manifest is basically the same. Frontenac was a mining town that in 1918 was made up of immigrants from twenty-one countries. In fact, at that time, only 12 percent of the people living in Frontenac had parents born in America. Coal mining was the main
industry in Frontenac, and family stories tell of company vouchers and the control of the mine in the town.

The Bone Dry Bill of 1917
made Kansas a “dry state.” This meant alcohol was illegal in Kansas well before Prohibition took effect nationwide. However, the two counties in the far southeast corner of Kansas, Cherokee and Crawford, often called the Little Balkans, were known to be the bootlegging capital of the Midwest.

Orphan trains
. Ned arrived in Manifest on what was known as an orphan train. Many orphaned children found themselves on trains heading from the East Coast to the Midwest, where they were adopted by families they didn’t know. Some children, like Ned, were adopted into loving homes; however, not all were as fortunate. Some children were adopted to be used primarily as hired hands on farms or to help out as domestic servants.

Spanish influenza
started out as a highly contagious flu that could infect hundreds of people in a matter of hours. Experts believe that it originated at Camp Funston, a military base near Manhattan, Kansas, in March of 1918. Initially, it was not known to be fatal, but after troop ships carried the illness overseas during World War I, the virus mutated into a much deadlier strain. The same troop ships carried the virus back to the United States, and this began the first wave of a worldwide pandemic that took millions of lives before it ran its course.

Immigrants
. In my research into immigrants passing through Ellis Island, I did not come across any story like that of Ned and Miss Sadie. However, Ellis Island has been called both the Island of Hope and the Island of Tears. There are countless tales of heartbreak and hardship that immigrants encountered when
making their journey to America, not unlike the one I have imagined in this story.

The rest of the story …

Of course most of the story is fiction. But even fiction has to come from somewhere. Many elements in the book were inspired by family stories and newspaper articles from regional papers of both 1918 and 1936.

The boot with Finn’s foot still in it
came from a story my dad told about his work investigating airplane crashes. Among the wreckage at one crash site, he found a boot “with the foot still in it.”