Walk on Earth a Stranger

After shucking my boots and banging them against the porch rail to get off the mud, I walk inside and find Daddy settled in his rocking chair, his big, stockinged feet stretched as near to the box stove as he dares. He starts to greet me but coughs instead, kerchief over his mouth. It rattles his whole body, and I can practically hear his bones shake. He pulls away the kerchief and crumples it in his fist to hide it. He thinks I don’t know what he’s coughing up.

The bed quilt drapes across his shoulders, and a mug of coffee steams on the tree-stump table beside him. The house smells of burning pine and freshly sliced turnips.

“Mama said you found some gold today,” Daddy says calmly as I set my boots next to the stove to dry.

“Yes, sir.” I head back to the table, where I reach into my pocket for the eggs I gathered and set them beside Mama’s stew pot.

He sips his coffee. Swallows. Sighs. “Did I ever tell you about the Spanish Moss Nugget?” he asks. Then he doubles over coughing, and I dare to hope it’s not so violent as it was yesterday.

“Tell me,” I say, though I’ve heard it a hundred times.

Mama’s gaze meets mine over the stew pot, and we share a secret smile. “Tell us,” she agrees. I pull up a chair, then lay my rifle on the table and start taking it apart.

“Well, since you insist. It happened in the spring of ’35,” he begins. “The easy pickings were long gone by then, and I’d had a hard day with nothing to show. I was walking home creekside, trying to beat the coming storm, when I chanced on a moss-fall under a broad oak. A wind came up and blew away the moss, and there she was, bright and beautiful and smiling; bigger than my fist, just sitting there, nice as you please.”

Never in my life have I seen a nugget so big. I’ve heard tales, but I’m not sure I believe them. Still, I nod as if I do.

He says, “But the storm was something awful, and night was falling. I couldn’t get to town to get her assayed, so I brought her home. I showed her off to your mama, then I hid her under the floorboards for safekeeping until the storm passed.”

He pauses to take another sip of coffee. The fire inside the stove pops. As soon as I’m done cleaning my gun, I’ll take off my stockings and lay them out to dry too.

“And then what happened?” I ask, because I’m supposed to.

He sets down his cup and rocks forward, eyes wide with the fever. “When I got up in the morning, what did I see but my own little Lee with that nugget in her chubby hand, banging it on the floor and laughing and kicking out her legs, like she’d found the greatest toy.”

Mama sighs with either remembrance or regret over the first time I divined gold. I was two years old.

He says, “So I re-hid it. This time in the larder.”

“But I found it again, didn’t I, Daddy?” I cover the ramrod in a patch of clean cloth and shove it down the muzzle. It comes out slightly damp, which means I might have faced a nasty backfire the next time I shot.

“Again and again and again. You found it under the mattress, lodged in the toe of my boot, even buried in the garden. That’s when I knew my girl was special. No, magical.”

Mama can’t hold back a moment more. “These are rough times,” she warns as she drops pieces of turnip into the pot. She has a small, soft voice, but it’s sneaky the way it can still a storm. Mostly, the storm she stills is my daddy. “Folks’d be powerful keen to hear tell of a girl who could divine gold.”

“They would, at that,” Daddy says thoughtfully. “Since there’s hardly a lick of surface gold left in these mountains.”

This is why we are not rich, and we never will be. Sure, the Spanish Moss Nugget bought our windows, our wagon, and the back porch addition. But the Georgia gold rush played itself out long ago, and it turns out that not even a magical girl can conjure gold from nothing or lift it from stubborn rock with just her thoughts. We’ve labored hard for what little I’ve been able to divine, and I’ve found less and less each year. Last summer, we diverted the stream and dug up the dry bed until not a speck remained. This year, we attacked the cliff side with our pickaxes until Daddy got too sick.

There’s more gold to be found deep in the ground—my honey-sweet sense tells me so—but there’s only so much two people can accomplish. Daddy refuses to buy slaves; he was raised Methodist, back in the day when the church was against slavery.

Today’s nugget is my first big find in more than a year.

Lord knows we need the money. Which is a mighty odd thing to need, considering that we have a bag of sweet, raw gold dust hidden beneath the floorboards. Daddy says we’re saving it for a rainy day.

But Mama says we hid it because taking so much gold to the mint would attract attention. She’s right. Whenever we bring in more than a pinch or two of dust, word gets out, and strangers start crawling all over our land like ants on a picnic, looking for the mother lode. In fact, I’ve earned my daddy a nickname: Reuben “Lucky” Westfall, everyone calls him. Only the three of us know the truth, and we’ve sworn to keep it that way.

In the meantime, the barn roof is starting to leak; the cellar shelves are still half empty, with the worst cold yet to come; and we owe Free Jim’s store for this year’s winter wheat seed. A big nugget like the one I found could take care of it all. It’s a lucky find, sure, but not so lucky as an entire flour sack of gold dust worked from a played-out claim.

“So, Leah,” Daddy says, and I look up from wiping the stock. He never calls me that. It’s always “Lee” or “sweet pea.”

“Yes, Daddy?”

“Where exactly did you find that rock?”

“By a new deer trail, west of the orchard.”

“I heard the rifle shot. Sounded like it came from a long ways off.”

“Sure did. Longer still before I got him. I nicked him in the flank, and he ran off. I tracked him down the mountain and across the creek to . . . Oh.”

I had crossed over onto McCauley land.

Daddy’s rocking chair stills. “It doesn’t belong to us,” he says softly.

“But we need—” I stop myself. Jefferson and his da need it as bad or worse than we do.

“We’re not thieves,” Daddy says.

“I found it fair and square!”

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. If Mr. McCauley came by and ‘found’ our peaches in the orchard, would it be all right to help himself to a bushel?”