MUSA STOOD HIGH ON the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork, watching the storm pulse over the hills on the West Virginia side of the river. He couldn’t see all the way to Blair Mountain, but he knew the thunderclouds must be there, too, pummeling the place.
They’d crossed the Tug earlier that afternoon. He and Aidee, their families, and Miss Beulah. Her body. The old woman was laid out in a pale shroud in the back of the cart, trailed by a flock of mourners from the Lick Creek colony and a single dark wolfhound.
Musa was glad to have everyone safe on this side of the river, but they’d had no word from his father yet. No one knew if more bombs had been dropped on the mountain or the schoolhouse overrun. If his father were alive, wounded, imprisoned. Telephone lines remained cut, roads blocked. A state of civil war.
They were staying with family friends here on the Kentucky side of the river, but the crowded rooms were too much for Musa. He had to get out. He and Moose had come out to the cemetery near the house, a steep green lawn of stone monuments where it seemed a single false step could send you sliding down the slope, toward a long drop into the green river below.
Musa had found the grave of Sid Hatfield. The ground was still unsettled here. A raw place in the earth. Later, a great tombstone might be erected, a monument with his face or deeds etched in stone. For now, only a modest headstone shouldered from the ground, adorned with sodden flowers and tassels.
A light rain fell slanted over the graves, beading in the wiry hair of Moose’s coat. Musa knelt beside the dog, ruffing his neck. What had happened here, what was still happening beneath that coming storm—it seemed resounding, a hammer’s blow to the very bell of the state, the nation, the world. Musa could feel it in his bare feet. Like history rumbling. But already he wondered how the outside world would hear it, if at all. For here was a land of steep slopes and dark hollers, heavy mists and deep mines—so many places to hide, to bury the truth.
“Not if I can help it,” he told Moose, thinking of the bomb he and Big Frank had hidden.
Still, he felt a darkness closing in, the stony faces of tombstones and the dead moldering in the ground beneath them, their spirits unsung. A storm crushing the sky, flattening it close over his head. The rain coming ever closer, moving like a wall, falling harder every second.
Then a voice lifted from the edge of the graveyard.
“Musa!”
He turned to see Aidee there. She leaned rain-slick over the iron stakes of the fence, waving to him. Her face shone like a silver bell.
“Musa, look who’s here!”
A hooded figure stepped to the fence beside her, clad in a dark oilskin slicker, his face shrouded from the rain. Musa rose and hurried toward them through the gusting wet, his possibles bag thumping against his ribs and the wolfhound running at his side. Then the figure removed his hood, smiling despite the storm, and Musa’s heart nearly leapt from his chest.
“Papa!”