Whisper Hollow Read Free Page A

stoppedto watch her skin settle back down. With her eyes still on her own arm, she reached forward to lift the next tuft of green with one hand and stretched the other out in anticipation of a dandelion shoot. But it was no dandelion that met her fingertips. She yanked back her hand and fell onto the ground with a thump when she grabbed, instead, something with fur.
    She blinked hard a few times and then, when nothing else moved, slowly pushed herself back onto her heels, her long legs bent like a grasshopper and her sharp knees pointing at the blue sky. Again she lifted the lettuce leaves, and she found splayed out the fresh-dead body of a small brown mouse.
    No insect morticians had yet arrived to claim the body. There was no blood, no apparent cause of death. She rocked forward onto the balls of her feet and craned her head to see if there was anything on the other side of the mouse. She found no stick nearby with which to lift it, so she reached forward and touched it carefully with the end of her index finger. Nothing. Just a warm pelt, softer than she would have imagined. She reached out again and stroked it — first with just the one finger, then with two, then three, and finally, the whole flat of her open palm.
    The mouse looked so peaceful lying there, curved in the lettuce shade as though taking a late-morning nap, its tail tucked around its long feet. She pulled up a tiny flower from within the rhubarbs and laid it across the mouse’s forepaws. If it wouldn’t cause her mother grief, Alta would have gone inside for her sketch paper and pencils to memorialize the dead mouse that looked so serene in his weed blossom funeral arrangement.
    Alta looked up, thinking instead she should offer a prayer to send his poor, lonely soul up to Heaven. She wasn’t sure it would be considered appropriate, but it was the only ritual she knew for a moment such as this. That’s when she saw the scuds of steam rising into the sky above the valley, a chain oftrain-made clouds signaling that the passenger engine was coming. Was it already almost noon?
    She abandoned the mouse as quickly as she’d found it, and took off barefoot down the garden and up the slant of yard and past her own house and past the row of twenty-six company houses that made up her street.
    The hard rains had stopped a few days before, but the dirt road was still muddy, especially along the sides. Even though she held it aloft, the hem of her dress would be filthy by the time she reached the station. Still, she wouldn’t slow down. She ran hard on her spindly legs, her feet flaring unskillfully out to the sides, keeping her pace by the trail of steam puffs, which she watched over her shoulder to make sure she was ahead of them. There were two reasons she wanted to meet the passenger engine at the yard: the Verra Bears were coming back from their away game after a two-month winning streak, and her uncle Punk and his new bride were arriving for a home visit from New York.
    She beat the train to the small station house with just enough time to climb the few steps to the platform and lean forward to catch her heaving breath, her hands clutching the heavy fabric at her knees. The tracks, running parallel to New Creek, lay between Whisper Hollow — which was bursting into bloom with monkey flowers and pigeonwing vines, ginseng and buffalo clover — and the town of Verra, which was comprised of the coal tipple, the coal camps, the company store and a few other shops, the barber’s, the post office, and two schools. When she could breathe normally again, Alta stood under the noon-struck clock with her back to the town and waited for the passengers to spill off the train.
    The station manager tucked his watch into his trouser pocket, adjusted his hat, and walked through a belch of steam to open the door. A few men stepped onto the platform first,stiff in their wool and blinking into the bright sunlight. Then an elderly woman clutching her daughter’s hand, who was