The man released Ruth’s arm and hobbled to the woman with a labored gait. He limped so badly he could hardly remain upright. When he was finally before the woman, he doubled over to catch his breath.
The woman looked at the man and said, “What’s your name, sir?”
He was too busy breathing.
The woman looked at Ruth. “Are you his daughter?”
“No, ma’am,” said Ruth.
The woman knelt low. She touched the man’s leg. “Is it this one?” she said. “Is this the one?”
He nodded. He cried.
The woman took a deep breath and rolled up his trousers, exposing a skinny leg, deformed and scarred.
The woman pressed both hands against the man’s leg. His breathing slowed. Ruth expected to see something miraculous, but she saw nothing. His leg did not change. There were no lights from heaven. But his posture became strong, and he stood upright. He stood on his own feet. And he took a few steps with ease, as though he’d never had a problem in his life.
The woman moved her eyes back to Ruth. “You’re a good friend,” she said.
“No, ma’am, I don’t know him.”
“What’s your name?” said the woman.
“Ruth.”
“Ruth,” the woman said. “You have such pretty hair, sweetheart.” The woman reached her hand to touch the girl’s hair.
Something happened. Something Ruth felt inside her temples. An unfamiliar feeling, and gentle. Not overwhelming, but soft. It worked its way across her head and through her eyes and down into her belly. It was a warm feeling. Like being dipped into a hot pond on a July afternoon.
The woman must’ve felt it too, because she looked at Ruth with large eyes and an open mouth. The woman pulled back from Ruth and placed a hand over her mouth.
And in that moment, the sounds of the congregation faded into nothing. The people around Ruth disappeared. All she could see was the woman’s outline, and all she could feel was the woman’s presence. It was unmistakable, the feeling inside her. It was a familiar feeling, located within the recesses of her person.
Ruth felt the dam inside her burst.
“Mama,” she said.
Ninety-Seven
Sewn Together
In her dream, Marigold was a child. She was lying on her back in the creek, her face aimed at the sky.
She was watching the clouds move upon themselves. They were slow, and the sky was powder blue. The groves of grass and monstrous pines loomed overhead, but she couldn’t see them. Only sky.
It was always there, and bigger than everything that lives in the world.
She felt something in her hand. She turned to see a man lying beside her in the water. He was wearing a white linen suit that was ruined with creek mud. He was young. Handsome. And it occurred to her that he was holding her hand. This young man. This man in linen.
She turned her head to the other side. She saw a little girl, also lying beside her. The girl had a mane of copper that had turned dark with the flowing spring water. The girl stared at the sky with her eyes wide open.
The girl grinned and met Marigold’s eyes. “Did you worry about me?” said the girl.
“I worried about you every second of every day,” said Marigold.
Then Marigold was yanked from her dream and found herself in a bed in a dark room. The walls were covered with mermaid wallpaper. Her child, Maggie, was beside her. An adult woman.
Earlier that night they had talked and cried until they’d fallen asleep here. They had shed enough tears to make a creek of their own.
Marigold had tried to fit a hundred years into a few hours of conversation. And each word she offered had felt weak somehow. Pathetic, even. Her words had seemed like silly attempts to explain something that was big, universal, something that was larger than words. She tried to describe the depths of pain she’d felt and the heights of anguish. But none of her words did it justice. She feared Maggie would never know her the way she wanted her to.
What Marigold really wanted was to sew their hearts together with thread and needle so that Maggie knew everything, knew how scared she’d been, and how her entire life had been sadness without her daughter, and how she never stopped thinking about her, and how every ticking second on the clock was peppered with thoughts of Maggie. But hearts can’t be sewn together. They will always be separated by flesh, bone, and distance. And weak words are all anyone can use.
Marigold crawled out of bed. She stepped over Coot, the young man who was married to her daughter, and the large dog who slept on the floor between them. The men were covered with flannel blankets, fast asleep on the floorboards. The dog was snoring.
Marigold walked outside beneath the night sky. From the breezeway of the motor inn, she could see Mobile Bay, calm as bathwater.
“Evening,” said Joseph. “Going for a walk?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You wanna come?”
“No thanks,” he said. “But you be careful.”
“I will.”
She wandered toward the bay, down the craggy hill that led to a sandy shore. She touched her foot into the cold water. She stared up at the sky. She looked at the moon. It had been her friend for a long time. For most of her life it had represented the only friend she had. But now it was not needed.
All her life she’d wanted to be known. That’s all anyone wanted, she thought, to be known. She wanted someone to worry about her. She wanted the gift of knowing that somebody concerned themselves with thoughts of her, the way she worried for others. Yes, that’s what she’d always wanted. She wanted someone to lose sleep thinking about her. She wanted someone to care enough about her to feel the same worry she felt for Maggie.
But here on the sand beside the bay, she realized she had indeed always been known and worried about. She could feel it. From the sky. She could feel it from the earth.
“I don’t understand,” she said in a soft voice. “And I don’t want to anymore. But I just wanna thank you. Thank you.”
She hoped for something to happen when she said it. She hoped for the sound of a bird or the splash of a wave or a gust of wind. Anything would’ve been welcome. But that isn’t the way life works.
She knelt on the sand. She folded her hands. She pressed them against her face. “Thank you,” she said again.
She heard the sound of footsteps behind her.
She turned to see Coot standing at a distance.
“I was getting worried about you,” he said.
Ninety-Eight
Cold Hands
A healer. That’s what people were calling her. They’d come from as far away as Atlanta to see her, to see the woman from the whorehouse. To have her pray for them. The crowd was even bigger than before. The wood structure wouldn’t begin to hold them all.
News of the healings had spread far and wide. Newspapermen were in attendance. There were men cranking movie cameras, standing on tall ladders, perched on the edges of the field. The governor had shown up. There were sick people, and families, and children, and old people.
People gathered together and waited for the harlot to touch them. It was terrifying and inspiring and humbling.
And she touched them all.
But something was very different today. Marigold touched a woman who claimed she had a blind left eye, but Marigold felt nothing in her hands. She felt no heat, no jolt, no nothing. The woman cried and blinked her eyes, claimed she felt different, but Marigold knew nothing had happened. And even though the woman rejoiced, Marigold knew the woman still had a blind eye when she left.
A lady with rheumatism came to Marigold next. She touched the woman on the shoulders. The woman tried to stand upright. She smiled and cried beneath the pain. But Marigold knew nothing had changed inside the woman. Marigold felt no buzzing in her head, no vibration in her hands, no heat in her palms.
A man with bad hearing followed the lady. Marigold touched the man’s ears. The man claimed he could hear out of his ear once again, but Marigold knew i
t wasn’t true. There were no healings, no miracles. There were only people who wanted to be whole. People who wanted someone to understand them.
It was over. She knew she was not the woman she’d been the day before. She knew something in her had shifted. Something in the sky had shifted.
The sun set like it always did that night, and the stars came out to play. The large crowds of people left, one vehicle at a time. And after a few hours, the entire place was nothing but a peanut field again.
“What’s wrong?” Coot finally asked.
She looked at his kind eyes and said, “For once in my life, nothing.”
Ninety-Nine
Tearing Things Down
The world came alive with the insect sounds of early evening. The sky was smeared with the colors of sunset. And men labored beneath it, deconstructing the wood stadium. It had taken two days to tear down the structure.
Coot enjoyed the sweat and task of loading large planks of wood into a truck with Pete and Joseph too. Coot couldn’t believe he was seeing the old man moving his limbs beneath the load of work, sweating. Joseph worked beside Coot, wearing a sweat-stained white T-shirt and work gloves on his hands. They hurled the wood planks like spears.
“How’re you doing?” Coot asked Joseph.
“What do you mean, how am I doing? I got raised from the dead, that’s how I’m doing. How are you doing is the better question.”
“I’m doing fine.”
“Well, I’m doing better than you.”
Joseph lifted a large plank of wood and shot it toward the truck with the strength of a teenager. The old man’s short-sleeved shirt revealed a skinny arm, loose-skinned but muscled.
One of the workmen whistled, then shouted, “Supper’s here!”
Coot stood straight to see a chain of automobiles winding through the empty dirt prairie. One car following another. The cars stopped, and women wearing cotton dresses emerged from them. They were all carrying casserole tins and covered dishes and baskets.
“The food wagon,” said Joseph. “Thank God, I was about to starve.”
“What’re you talking about?” said Coot. “You’ve done nothing but eat jerky and crackers all day.”
Coot saw Marigold walking toward him. She carried a basket under one arm, her daughter walking close beside her beneath the other. Tailing them was a dog with very long ears and a big appetite. The two women had heads of hair that were the same shade in the setting sunlight. Like fire.
Marigold was watching Coot too. She stopped and their eyes locked on one another. Coot lifted his arm to wave at her. She waved back at him. She came near to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He kissed her, and she kissed him back. He felt the closeness of her, and it was almost too much to bear. It was so rewarding it was almost dreamlike.
“I take that back,” said Joseph. “You’re doing better than I am.”
One Hundred
Hollering
Rabbit Creek forked from the bay water and meandered through the thicket of cypress trees that poked from the water like little men, bearing the weight of their limbs. The longleaf pines looked purple in the distance. The live oaks were towering high, snaking their branches over the surface of the water.
There was a noise in the distance.
Marigold listened to Stringbean howl. The dog let out low, happy howls. She smiled at the dog. The animal’s black-and-tan fur dripped with bay water that turned her hair into a curly mess. The animal had been swimming in the water all morning. Marigold never had so much fun, watching an animal play without holding back. She’d been tossing sticks for the dog to chase, and felt sorry that she’d gone almost an entire life without knowing the simple pleasures of a dog.
Ruth was beside her. Ruth hollered at the dog, and her voice cut through the air like a mother’s voice.
“Get over here, Bean!” said Ruth, patting her thighs. “C’mon, girl!”
Her shouts bounced off the bay water and were met with the sound of a dog’s paws clomping on the earth in a dead sprint. Marigold watched the animal gallop toward home, and it was stunning to see the muscles of the animal, flexed in the full sunlight.
The dog neared them and shook her coat. Water flung in all directions like a sideways thunderstorm.
She felt something stir inside her. How she felt when she watched the storms that used to flood the creek behind Cowikee’s. The rains would fill the creek so high that the brown water would become level with the earth, and it was almost impossible to tell where the creek began and the earth ended. It always made her feel good to see so much rain falling at once. It made her grateful. It was a gift from the heavens to the earth. A simple gift. That’s how she felt now. She felt like she’d been given a drink of water that filled her from the inside.
Earlier that day, Helen and the girls had come to visit. They had brought cold salads and baskets of blackberries and flowers. They’d spent the entire afternoon telling Ruth stories about Marigold’s youth. They talked so much that Marigold was sure Ruth’s head was going to split open. Before Helen left, with Abe’s hand in hers, she held Marigold for so long that they almost forgot they were holding each other. No words were spoken because none were needed.
That evening Marigold went for a long walk with Ruth through the thick forest. She asked Ruth, “Would it be okay if I held your hand, sweetie?” And Ruth stretched out her hand. They touched. The girl’s hand was warm, and Marigold’s was not. They walked the shore of the bay until the no-see-ums and mosquitoes had destroyed their arms and legs. They picked a few wildflowers. And Marigold felt the warmth that was once in her hands move into her chest instead.
“Why did you name me Maggie?” Ruth asked.
Marigold told her the story and sang the lyrics of the song, and did her best not to cry. It was so odd to be singing it to this girl she knew but didn’t know. She was not Ruth, not to Marigold. But then, she was not her Maggie either, but someone infinitely more beautiful and striking than Maggie could ever be. This was a woman. A woman who was her own person. Strong, brave, and kind.
Ruth pulled Marigold into herself. “You know, I always thought of you and wondered what you’d be like.”
Marigold lost herself in their embrace. “I thought of you every second of every day.”
They pressed themselves together and rested their foreheads against one another. Their red hair became mingled, and their hearts were as close as they’d ever been without being sewn together. Marigold could feel Maggie. And within the strange manner the universe works, she knew her Maggie had become the person she was intended to be.
“I’m sorry,” said Marigold, for it was all she could think to say, and it was something she’d been wanting to say for a very long time. Anything else would have sounded wrong. Anything else would’ve been too much.
Ruth smiled. “Quit your sorryin’,” she said.
Discussion Questions
Paul and Vern are migrant workers during the Depression and do what it takes to survive. Can you relate to their struggle? What words would you use to describe these two men and their enduring friendship?
How would you describe Marigold’s gifts, and what was the source of her power? How would you react if you met someone like her?
Why is E. P. such a successful conman? What is he selling that people are buying? What are the people in his crowds desperate to hear?
This novel is full of kind and generous moments. Did any particular scene touch you more than others? Did you see yourself or someone you know in any of the characters?
What are the lessons that the adults teach the young in this novel? What sort of wisdom do the elders impart? And what, if anything, do the young teach the old?
E. P. Willard is driven by greed as well as jealousy. How else would you describe this man, and what is the irony of his rivalry with J. Wilbur Chaplain?
Discuss how this novel explores what it means to choose a family. Must people be related by blood to feel responsible for one another? How do
people rise up amid hard circumstances to take care of their loved ones?
Why do you think Marigold finds a home at Cowikee’s? How does Coot wind up in Alabama?
For much of the novel, people proclaim that either “revival is coming” or “the end is near.” Do you think these sentiments were specific to the time and place, or have people always believed the world to be on the brink of destruction? Why or why not?
What is the significance of this novel’s title—Stars of Alabama? Did you notice any references to the title while reading?
Acknowledgments
This book never could have happened without my wife, Jamie, and my editor. Thank you.
About the Author
Photo by Sean Murphy
Sean Dietrich is a columnist, podcaster, speaker, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His work has appeared in Southern Living, the Tallahassee Democrat, Good Grit, South Magazine, Yellowhammer News, the Bitter Southerner, Thom Magazine, and the Mobile Press-Register, and he has authored ten books.
* * *
Visit Sean online at seandietrich.com
Instagram: seanofthesouth
Facebook: seanofthesouth
Twitter: @seanofthesouth1
Copyright
Stars of Alabama
© 2019 by Sean Dietrich
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.
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