Nothing Gold Can Stay Read Free Page B

angled around the barn until he could see the field. The farmer was there, hitched to the horse and plow. Sinkler called her name and Lucy stepped out on the porch. She wore the same muslin dress and carried a knotted bedsheet in her hand. When she got to the woods, Lucy opened the bedsheet and removed a shirt and what was little more than two flaps of tied leather.
    “Go over by the well and put these brogans on,” Lucy said. “It’s a way to fool them hounds.”
    “We need to get going,” Sinkler said.
    “It’ll just take a minute.”
    He did what she asked, checking the field to make sure that the farmer wasn’t looking in their direction.
    “Keep your shoes in your hand,” Lucy said, and walked toward Sinkler with the shirt.
    When she was close, Lucy got on her knees and rubbed the shirt cloth over the ground, all the way to his feet. Smart of her, Sinkler had to admit, though it was an apple-knocker kind of smart.
    “Walk over to the other side of the barn,” she told him, scrubbing the ground as she followed.
    She motioned him to stay put and retrieved the bedsheet.
    “This way,” she said, and led him down the slanted ground and into the woods.
    “You expect me to wear these all the way to Asheville?” Sinkler said after the flapping leather almost tripped him.
    “No, just up to the ridge.”
    They stayed in the woods and along the field’s far edge and then climbed the ridge. At the top Sinkler took off the brogans and looked back through the trees and saw the square of plowed soil, now no bigger than a barn door. The farmer was still there.
    Lucy untied the bedsheet and handed him the pants and shirt. He took off his stripes and hid them behind a tree. Briefly, Sinkler thought about taking a little longer before he dressed, suggesting to Lucy that the bedsheet might have another use. Just a few more hours, he reminded himself, you’ll be safe for sure and rolling with her in a big soft bed. The chambray shirt wasn’t a bad fit, but the denim pants hung loose on his hips. Every few steps, Sinkler had to hitch them back up. The bedsheet held nothing more and Lucy stuffed it in a rock crevice.
    “You bring that money?” he asked.
    “You claimed us not to need it,” Lucy said, a harshness in her voice he’d not heard before. “You weren’t trifling with me about having money for the train tickets, were you?”
    “No, darling, and plenty enough to buy you that bracelet and a real dress instead of that flour sack you got on. Stick with me and you’ll ride the cushions.”
    They moved down the ridge through a thicket of rhododendron, the ground so aslant that in a couple of places he’d have tumbled if he hadn’t watched how Lucy did it, front foot sideways and leaning backward. At the bottom, the trail forked. Lucy nodded to the left. The land continued downhill, then curved and leveled out. After a while, the path snaked into the undergrowth and Sinkler knew that without Lucy he’d be completely lost. You’re doing as much for her as she for you, he reminded himself, and thought again about what another convict might do, what he’d known all along he couldn’t do. When others had brought a derringer or Arkansas toothpick to card games, Sinkler arrived empty-handed, because either one could take its owner straight to the morgue or to prison. He’d always made a show of slapping his pockets and opening his coat at such gatherings. “I’ll not hurt anything but a fellow’s wallet,” he’d say. Men had been killed twice in his presence, but he’d never had a weapon aimed in his direction.
    Near another ridge, they crossed a creek that was little more than a spring seep. They followed the ridge awhile and then the trail widened and they moved back downhill and up again. Each rise and fall of the land looked like what had come before. The mountain air was thin and if Sinkler hadn’t been hauling water such distances he wouldn’t have had the spunk to keep going. They went on, the