The Tilted World A Novel by Tom Franklin

Author:Tom Franklin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-30T19:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Dixie Clay was torn from her nightmare by the shovel-in-gravel scrape of thunder. She lay stunned by her visions, for they were of a terrible black steam train. Long windowless cars humpbacked over each hill on Seven Hills and chuffed closer, louder, needing no track at all, coming to cart her away, to take her to the lynching tree. The two missing revenuers were leaning out the windows. So she snatched Willy from his baby bed and took off into the woods and up the ridge, and when she turned, she saw the train slow at her drive then take the sharp right, following her yet. She thought, I’ll lead it to the still, I don’t care, and we’ll make our escape. So she ran past the still, but the train kept coming, gaining on her. She broke through the woods to the stream and held Willy aloft while fording, passing the bloated carcasses of a doe and fawn caught in a logjam, the train snorting its smoke at her back. That’s when she realized it was coming not for her, or for the still, but for Willy.

She was glad the thunder had woken her, though Lord she hated thunder by now, hated thunderclouds, hated clouds. It stormed so often that storms managed to be both terrifying and tedious. Still, better wake in this storm than sleep in that dream. She lay unmoving in the dark and then heard the shovel-in-gravel again but it was coming not from outside but inside her room. It was coming from Willy.

When they’d returned from the still around 3 A.M., she’d given him his night bottle and he’d coughed then too and she’d thought he’d gobbled too much milk—greedy baby!—and it had choked him. His cough had not been his sweet airball cough, a teacup-sized cough, soft as a match struck to light a lamp. His cough had been a knife scraping a tin plate. Now, shortly before dawn, he gave it again.

She rose and bent over his willow branch baby bed and studied him in the dim light. His color seemed high and fine, pink cheeks and closed eyes. She heaved a breath and made a step back to her bed when he coughed again. She turned and saw his body knock with the force of it, his eyes slitting open and gleaming in the half dark.

Hmmm. Willy has a cold. Naming it made it better: babies got colds, didn’t they, poor things. They got colds and you fretted but then they got better.

She’d had Willy for eleven days now and he’d not suffered so much as a sniffle, but this weather could get the best of anyone. Yesterday in the seam where the chimney met the wall, a line of mushrooms had knobbed forth like hat hooks. It was, as Jesse would say, wetter than an otter’s pocket. Where was Jesse now? She hadn’t seen him since the day Ingersoll had met her at the stream, and that was four days ago.

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