Free The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page B

He’s saying, one Jesus to every Jesus, one God to every God. Go home, He’s saying to them.”
    Pressing his hand to my brow, the parson smiled. “Rest now. Sleep,” he said, and went slanting off, boots whispering on the floor, certain I was crazed.
    Not a particle of sleep or rest for me that night. Staring up into the darkness looking for the face of God peering down upon Himself. I could not find God up there in the dimness, but I did see the shades of boys quitting their beds, shouldering their stinking pallets, shuffling off homeward. I saw them winding up the blue passes of the Adirondacks, fording the black loam of the ploughed fields of Ohio. I saw them drifting along rich river bottoms, every whit as golden as the turning leaves that showered down upon their heads, or blowing grimy-faced as the dirty smoke that came blustering down the broad avenues of New York and Boston.
    They were tramping under the buckshot stars that riddled the deep blue sky over Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. An Atlantic storm slapped them sideways, filled their boot prints with cold rain in Massachusetts. Home, they said to themselves as they scrambled over snake fences in Iowa or waded through the ditches of Illinois, grass trailing along their waists. Home.
    I saw them resurrecting.
    I knew then I would see these boys for all of my natural born days, would never forget them, and that for the rest of my life I would wish it was my fate to take up my bed and go with them.
    Now I wish I could witness Madge Dray do the same. In my mind, get up and go home to her sister, Lucy Stoveall.

7

    LUCY
The sun was so hot bright that when I came in the jail with Sheriff Hinckey, it nigh blinded me, the murk. I could just make out Justice Daniels setting behind a desk, shirt a patch of white in the dusk, and the silhouette of Mr. Straw, pressed up against the bars of the cell. I said nary a word, just stumbled by them, looking for Madge’s body. I found her in a corner. Her face was only part-covered, her two bare legs sticking out from the blanket, white, slender peeled willows. Madge’s body so thin, so small. Nobody had the decency to close her eyes.
    I tried to cover her but the blanket wouldn’t reach head to toe. I caught a whiff of horse. The bastards had covered her with a saddle blanket. That she should be used so, the disrespect of it, put me all atremble, swept me with tears. I stood there, my head hanging, clenching down the shake in my throat until I could get my words out clear and strong. “You fetch my sister to our wagon. You get her off this dirt floor and out of this horse stink and you bring her to my wagon.” I turned round. The three of them, the law and Straw, were standing stock-still, looking at me.
    I said to Mr. Daniels, loud and sharp, “I suppose you heard me?”
    He didn’t like being spoken to so. It roused him up. “Miz Stoveall, we’ll deliver the body directly once you answer us a few questions. I got no interest in it going high here in my office.”
    He had no business pushing back at me in that fashion. Putting it that way. But it worked. All I could do was fumble out, “What kind of questions?”
    “Did Straw bring your sister back last night?”
    “Yes, he did.”
    “You are certain of that?”
    “I heard her in the wagon. Felt her come over to kiss me. She always did so before sleep.”
    “You did not lay eyes on Straw. But you say you felt your sister kiss you. Could be a dream you had.”
    A sob rose up in me, I tried to choke it down. “No, no, this was no dream. I know what I felt!” I cried out. “But later I woke up and she wasn’t there. It scared me.”
    “Maybe you supposed she’d snuck off to Straw. Tell the truth now, woman.”
    “My baby sister, she was a good girl. She didn’t sneak off with Mr. Straw.”
    “So where did she go, if it weren’t to Straw, do you reckon?”
    Mr. Straw spoke up sudden, gave me a chance to collect myself. “Madame Magique. She went back to see