The Story Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

knobby-legged girl into a womanish body these last few seasons, his favors were the ones she saw in the cloudy, oval-shaped mirror over Aginisi’s dresser. His high cheekbones and wide, thick mouth. His straight brows that cast a hard, heavy shadow. His long, lean frame. But Mama’s stark blue eyes and rope-crimp black hair and hickory-nut skin. At sixteen, there was no mistakin’ Sarra’s kin, and for that reason Brown Drigger had thought twicet about takin’ her to secure the debt agin his money pouch until her daddy’s returning.
    Brown Drigger was afraid to end up keepin’ her . . . but then again, he wanted her. She’d found that out quick. He’d come round at night, touchin’ while she lay curled into herself like winter possum, playin’ sleep. He’d do no more while he waited for her daddy to show hisself here, but time was runnin’ out for her either way.
    She’d heard it said to Brown Drigger   —there was money in a girl that hadn’t been made a woman yet.
    Sarra wanted nothin’ of Brown Drigger, nor her daddy, nor any man. Aginisi had warned her of it, and Mama’d taught the lesson by doin’, time and time again. Her daddy’s coming brung sweetness and bobbles and sour mash whiskey to the little dugout behind Aginisi and Gran-dey’s log house. And then come hurt. Mama, simpleminded as she was, never seemed to have a knowin’ of it ahead, but Aginisi did, and Gran-dey did when he was still livin’. The three ofthem warred inside Sarra, even from the grave. There was Aginisi’s tellin’ that her daddy was no good, and Gran-dey’s warnin’ there wasn’t no trustin’ the man, and Mama’s believin’ there was some good that hadn’t been found out yet. There was the bond of blood ties, the last she held on this earth.
    If the man was still livin’, after all.
    If not, she knew the mountains well enough. She’d got friendly with Brown Drigger’s dogs   —the ones he’d promised would track her down and tear flesh from bone if she tried runnin’ off.
    Even as the thought henpecked, Sarra crept past the low-slung cabin wall, shinnied under the edge in the wet leaf litter where stone piers held the split joists up off the mountainside. Smothering a hand over her mouth, she tipped an ear up to listen. It was one of the newcomers she was wonderin’ about just now. The younger man who’d come up the trail to Brown Drigger’s store, ridin’ a rawboned gray behind the muleteer’s wagon.
    Muleteers, she’d seen a time or two here, come to trade goods and haul off pelts, silver coin, and sour mash whiskey. But the young man was a new thing, and strange to the mountains. His clothes made him out for a Jasper plain enough, but it showed most in how he watched ever’thing while the muleteer and Brown Drigger chewed words as traders do. The young man studied the world in the way of a winter colt finally let out to spring pastures and catchin’ sight of the big, wide world, first time ever.
    When he snatched off his fine felt hat to follow inside, his hair fell straw-colored and soft, close-cropped behind his neck and curly. His face was shaved bare, too smooth and young for the tall, lankishway of him. But he’d moved toward Brown Drigger’s cabin with a sure stride. Just before steppin’ up the porch, he seemed to look her way, toward the smokehouse, where she’d been cleanin’ the boil pot to ready for a sausage makin’. This morn, Brown Drigger’s men had kilt three hogs took in trade for moonshine. Their fat carcasses hung behind the cabin, split and gutted, the blood draining off into the ground, the last of it slow and thick like honey.
    Brown Drigger and the newcomers had been inside hours now as the carcasses cooled and Sarra worked to wash and prepare the intestines for casing up the sausage. She’d done the same many a time with Aginisi, her small hands workin’ beside her grandmother’s to turn the guts wrong-out and rinse water through before carefully scrapin’