Nothing Gold Can Stay Read Free

pulled him back, pressed her face into his chest.
    “If we was far away it wouldn’t matter. I hate it here. He cusses me near every day and won’t let me go nowhere. When he’s drunk, he fetches his rifle and swears he’s going to shoot me.”
    “It’s all right,” Sinkler said, and patted her shoulder.
    She let go of him slowly. The only sound was a clucking chicken and the breeze tinking the well bucket against the narrow stone wellhead.
    “All you and me have to do is get on that train in Asheville,” Lucy said, “and not him nor the law can catch us. I know where he keeps his money. I’ll get it if you ain’t got enough.”
    He met her eyes, then looked past her. The sun was higher now, angled in over the mountaintops, and the new well bucket winked silver as it swayed. Sinkler lifted his gaze to the cloudless sky. It would be another hot, dry, miserable day and he’d be out in it. At quitting time, he’d go back and wash up with water dingy enough to clog a strainer, eat what would gag a hog, then at nine o’clock set his head on a grimy pillow. Three and a half more years. Sinkler studied the ridgeline, found the gap that would lead to Asheville.
    “I’ve got money,” he told Lucy. “It’s the getting to where I can spend it that’s been the problem.”
     
    That night as he lay in his bunk, Sinkler pondered the plan. An hour would pass before anyone started looking for him, and even then they’d search first along the road. As far out as the prisoners were working, it’d take at least four hours to get the bloodhounds on his trail, and by the time the dogs tracked him to Asheville he’d be on a train. It could be months, or never, until such a chance came again. But the suddenness of the opportunity unsettled him. He should take a couple of days, think it out. The grit in the gears would be Lucy. Giving her the slip in Asheville would be nigh impossible, so he’d be with her until the next stop, probably Knoxville or Raleigh. Which could be all for the better. A hotel room and a bottle of bootleg whiskey and they’d have them a high old time. He could sneak out early morning while she slept. If she took what her husband had hidden, she’d have enough for a new start, and another reason not to drop a dime and phone the police.
    Of course, many a convict would simply wait until trail’s end, then let a good-sized rock take care of it, lift what money she had, and be on his way. Traveling with a girl that young was a risk. She might say or do something to make a bluecoat suspicious. Or, waking up to find him gone, put the law on him just for spite.
    The next morning, the men loaded up and drove to where they’d quit the day before. They weren’t far from the farmhouse now, only a few hundred yards. As he carried the buckets up the road, Sinkler realized that if Lucy knew the trail, then the husband did too. The guards would see the farmer in the field and tell him who they were looking for. How long after that would he find out that she was gone? It might be just minutes before the husband went to check. But only if the guards were looking in that direction. When the time came, he’d tell Vickery this well was low and the farmer wouldn’t let him use it anymore, so he had to go back down the road to the widow’s. He could walk in that direction and then cut into the woods and circle back.
    Sinkler was already drawing water when Lucy came out. Primping for him, he knew, her hair unpinned and freshly combed, curtaining a necklace with a heart-shaped locket. She smelled good too, a bright and clean smell like honeysuckle. In the distance, the husband was strapped to his horse, the tandem trudging endlessly across the field. From what Sinkler had seen, the man worked as hard as the road crews and had about as much to show for it. Twenty years older and too much of a gink to realize what Lucy understood at eighteen. Sinkler stepped closer to the barn and she raised her mouth to his, found his