Also by J.L. Salter

Prologue

March 30, 1919

Her worn overcoat already fastened as tightly as possible, Belva Butler’s bony fingers held the top of one lapel flap against the spot where the button was missing. With her other hand, she pulled her woolen scarf over her ears and clasped the ends against her throat.

As the sun hovered over the treetops to her right, she stood in the small graveyard. The hand-shaped stone marker bore no name, but she studied it as though she were reading. Belva remembered how she felt at sixteen, so long ago: the middle of the War Between the States. She never called it the Civil War because it was anything but civil. Brutal and horrible, it was devastating to the state, their community, her family… and to her.

Fifty-six years ago that very night was when her life first changed. Then a few years later, everything transformed again.

Without realizing, she began humming a mournful tune. Though people had mentioned this to her, she never seemed to notice. Humming that song felt as natural as breathing. A gust of wind made her shiver as she watched the sun disappear behind the highest branches of the leafless westerly trees.

Belva leaned forward slowly and placed in front of the unmarked stone a small, white blossom which she’d grown indoors on a windowsill. Though struggling to mature out of season, it was enough of a flower to suit anyone, especially here in the quiet cemetery. Nobody else would bring flowers until Decoration Day at the end of May. Her specially-grown flower, two months before anyone else, made this her private commemoration — her ritual every year on that date, weather notwithstanding.

Belva shuddered again, her frail bones aching. She exited the rusty wire gate and walked carefully over the hillside, through several gullies, along the crude line of dense cedars and oaks. At a large sinkhole, one of three near her little cottage, she paused again.

Clutching the thin coat around her neck with one hand, she reached into a coat pocket with the other. With considerable difficulty, she extracted a small, dark bundle. Belva stood there quite a while, gazing down into the deep sinkhole, seeming to calculate something. Perhaps she wondered whether she’d see another of her private annual Decoration Days.

Then she tossed in the bundle. Actually, it was more of a slow release. One might think it caressed her skin as it finally broke contact with her wrinkled fingertips… and fell to the sinkhole’s deepest part.

Another sudden gust swept away her scarf, which wafted upward slightly before settling into a different area of the pit, part way up the side nearest her. She thought about trying to retrieve it, but that would be too dangerous with the dark, the cold, and her unsteady legs. The sun was gone, leaving only a hint of orange in the western sky. Belva eyed the bright half moon and guessed just enough light remained to finish her business.

She made her way carefully to the small spring some forty yards away and lower on the slope. Everybody said the water sprang from somewhere deep below the sinkhole.

She turned over the dented metal bucket from its resting place on the small rock ledge just above the spring and filled it a bit less than halfway. Water was heavy and Belva longed for the day when her pump would be fixed. She also wished she had a heavier winter coat. She was upset at losing her warmest scarf in the sinkhole, but at least she could do something about that: she’d go back tomorrow morning and fish it out with a potato rake.

Belva trudged down the hill, past the fence-row, and over toward the southeast corner of the family property. She had hoped someday to build a proper farm house farther east toward the road, but the ground was too steep, and everybody said it would take too many wagon loads of dirt to build it up enough. It probably wouldn’t happen… not in her lifetime anyway.

By the time Belva reached her back door it was even colder. The last two days of March always seemed the bitterest.

****

Ten days later she was found dead in her cold bed; the blackened stove’s coal fire had been out for a long time. Her old family Bible, on the floor, appeared as if it had fallen from her hands while she was reading.

It was said Aunt Belva was seventy-two years old. Hard years, every one.