Clare Vanderpool - Moon Over Manifest

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Clare Vanderpool

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vanderpool, Clare.

Moon over Manifest / Clare Vanderpool. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

eISBN: 978-0-375-89616-3 [1. Secrets—Fiction. 2. Fathers—Fiction. 3. Depressions—1929—Fiction. 4. Kansas—Fiction.]

I. Title.

PZ7.P28393Mo 2010

[Fic]—dc22

2009040042

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.1

To Mother and Daddy ,

for loving a good story, and a good laugh ,

and for giving me a good life

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Characters

Contents

Santa Fe Railway

Path to Perdition

Shady’s Place

First Morning

Sacred Heart of the Holy Redeemer Elementary School

Fort Treeconderoga

Main Street, Manifest

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

Triple Toe Creek

A Bargain Is Struck

Likely Suspects

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

The Art of Distraction

Frog Hunting

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

The Victory Quilt

Under the Stars

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

Elixir of Life

Dead or Alive

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

No-Man’s-Land

One Short, One Long

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

The Walls Go Up

Ode to the Rattler

Drawing Straws

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

Distribution

A Dying Breath

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

Day of Reckoning

The Jungle

Remember When

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

Homecoming

Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

St. Dizier

The Shadow of Death

The Shed

The Diviner

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

The Rattler

Author’s Note

Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

CHARACTERS

Manifest townspeople of 1918

SHADY HOWARD: saloon owner and bootlegger

JINX: con artist extraordinaire

NED GILLEN: Manifest High School track star

HATTIE MAE HARPER: up-and-coming journalist for the Manifest Herald

THE HUNGARIAN WOMAN: owner and operator of Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor

SISTER REDEMPTA: nun, not a universal

IVAN DEVORE: postmaster

VELMA T. HARKRADER: chemistry teacher and maker of home Remedies

MR. UNDERHILL: undertaker

HADLEY GILLEN: Ned’s father and owner of the hardware store

EUDORA LARKIN: president of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Manifest chapter)

PEARL ANN LARKIN: daughter of Mrs. Larkin, and Ned’s girl

ARTHUR DEVLIN: mine owner

LESTER BURTON: pit boss

FINN: Jinx’s uncle

Additional townspeople and their countries of origin

DONAL MACGREGOR: Scotland

CALLISTO MATENOPOULOS: Greece

CASIMIR AND ETTA (AND LITTLE EVA) CYBULSKIS: Poland

OLAF AND GRETA AKKERSON: Norway

MAMA SANTONI: Italy

HERMANN KEUFER: Germany

NIKOLAI YEZIERSKA: Russia

Manifest townspeople of 1936

ABILENE TUCKER: new girl in town

GIDEON TUCKER: Abilene’s father

LETTIE AND RUTHANNE: friends of Abilene

PASTOR SHADY HOWARD: still a little shady

HATTIE MAE MACKE: still writing “Hattie Mae’s News Auxiliary”

IVAN DEVORE: still postmaster

VELMA T.: still the chemistry teacher

SISTER REDEMPTA: still a nun

MISS SADIE: still a diviner

MR. UNDERHILL: still the undertaker

MR. COOPER: the barber

MRS. DAWKINS: owner of Dawkins Drug and Dime

MRS. EVANS: woman who sits on her porch and stares

Santa Fe Railway

SOUTHEAST KANSAS MAY 27, 1936

The movement of the train rocked me like a lullaby. I closed my eyes to the dusty countryside and imagined the sign I knew only from stories. The one just outside of town with big blue letters: MANIFEST: A TOWN WITH A RICH PAST AND A BRIGHT FUTURE.

I thought about my daddy, Gideon Tucker. He does his best talking in stories, but in recent weeks, those had become few and far between. So on the occasion when he’d say to me, “Abilene, did I ever tell you ’bout the time …?” I’d get all quiet and listen real hard. Mostly he’d tell stories about Manifest, the town where he’d lived once upon a time.

His words drew pictures of brightly painted storefronts and bustling townsfolk. Hearing Gideon tell about it was like sucking on butterscotch. Smooth and sweet. And when he’d go back to not saying much, I’d try recalling what it tasted like. Maybe that was how I found comfort just then, even with him being so far away. By remembering the flavor of his words. But mostly, I could taste the sadness in his voice when he told me I couldn’t stay with him for the summer while he worked a railroad job back in Iowa. Something had changed in him. It started the day I got a cut on my knee. It got bad and I got real sick with infection. The doctors said I was lucky to come out of it. But it was like Gideon had gotten a wound in him too. Only he didn’t come out of it. And it was painful enough to make him send me away.

I reached into my satchel for the flour sack that held my few special things. A blue dress, two shiny dimes I’d earned collecting pop bottles, a letter from Gideon telling folks that I would be received by Pastor Howard at the Manifest depot, and my most special something, kept in a box lined with an old 1917 Manifest Herald newspaper: my daddy’s compass.

In a gold case, it wore like a pocket watch, but inside was a compass showing every direction. Only problem was, a working compass always points north. This one, the arrow dangled and jiggled every which way. It wasn’t even that old. It had the compass maker’s name and the date it was made on the inside. St. Dizier, October 8, 1918 . Gideon had always planned to get it fixed, but when I was leaving, he said he didn’t need it anyway, what with train tracks to guide him. Still, I liked imagining that the chain of that broken compass was long enough to stretch all the way back into his pocket, with him at one end and me at the other.

Smoothing out the yellowed newspaper for the thousandth time, I scanned the page, hoping to find some bit of news about or insight into my daddy. But there was only the same old “Hogs and Cattle” report on one side and a “Hattie Mae’s News Auxiliary: Charter Edition” on the other, plus a couple of advertisements for Liberty Bonds and Billy Bump’s Hair Tonic. I didn’t know anything about Hattie Mae Harper, except what she wrote in her article, but I figured her newspaper column had protected Gideon’s compass for some time, and for that I felt a sense of gratitude. I carefully placed the newspaper back in the box and stored the box in the satchel, but held on to the compass. I guess I just needed to hold on to something.