Night Came with Many Stars Read online

  also by simon van booy

  fiction

  The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories

  Love Begins in Winter: Stories

  Everything Beautiful Began After

  The Illusion of Separateness

  Tales of Accidental Genius: Stories

  Father’s Day

  The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories

  nonfiction

  Why We Need Love

  Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter

  Why We Fight

  children’s fiction

  Gertie Milk & the Keeper of Lost Things

  Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue

  Published in 2021 by

  Godine, Publisher

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Copyright © 2021 by Simon Van Booy

  all rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information, please visit www.godine.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Van Booy, Simon, author.

  Title: Night came with many stars : a novel / Simon Van Booy.

  Description: Boston : Godine, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020050053

  ISBN 9781567927030 (hardback)

  ISBN 9781567927047 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6122.A36 N54 2021 | DDC 823/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050053

  This book is dedicated to

  Alfredia, Samuel, Sam, and Uncle Rusty

  author’s note

  This work would not have been possible without the love, friendship, and family stories entrusted to me over three decades by the members of one family from rural Kentucky.

  Carol

  1933

  After checking for his truck in the front yard, Carol hurried downstairs to scour the cupboards for some breakfast. She sang because the house was empty. Her voice filled each room like invisible writing. Finally, under the stairs, in a crate hidden by some Model T tires, she discovered flour in a round tin the government had given them last year. She carried it to the kitchen table, then went outside to the well, still barefoot and moving quickly through the wet, nodding grass and green weeds. Carol knew the water was cold from how the rope smelled in her hands. The bucket glugged from a black pool fed by a slow river that was even deeper than the bones of her grandpa, who had died in a plowed field with no sound, just a quick folding up into the brown waves. Carol could hardly speak then. But she remembered the body being brought to the house with his face the color of winter.

  Her father sold the land after that. Put down the old man’s tools and picked up a bottle. A deck of cards. A gun when necessary.

  Carol hauled the full bucket inside, trying not to spill. Her daddy would return soon, and like a dark spirit see through every fallen drop, as if each were an eye and her life a succession of small, glaring mistakes. She had woken up hungry with the desire for an egg. But the chickens were long gone; a scar on her back proved it. Sometimes Carol reached around and fingered the scar, pushed on the memory knitted beneath. The henhouse door had been left open and coyotes got in. The morning her father had found it empty, he yanked and ripped at the coop until it rose like a stiff net. There was spit whipping from his mouth as he pulled at the frame, snapping thin ribs of wood. Carol had squeezed into a kitchen cupboard where she could smell the sweat from behind her knees. She thought about crawling under the porch, but the darkness there, the rotting planks and those limp, eyeless creatures roaming the damp soil was terror of a different kind. When her daddy came to a wood slat that wouldn’t break, his rage changed course and he followed it into the house, eyes churning with fury.

  That was years ago now, though Carol still liked to imagine the coyotes’ eyes glowing with careful intent as they carried her father’s birds, wet in their mouths, to a place more smell than touch.

  When Carol outgrew the cupboards she made for the deep woods, where she could be lost without being lost from herself. They were a refuge, an exhalation—except when snow lay thick and drifted and the cold tore at anything it could touch. Then, Carol waited for spring the way a person waits for some beloved friend who has already begun the long journey home. At the end of winter, with the cold still loose but weak, Carol would enter the woods, wade through currents of dead leaves, watching for a single eye of color that meant it was close. She wondered where those early flowers came from, how they knew the moment to blink their eyes in the soil.

  A small clearing in the forest was Carol’s favorite place. She could lie on her back beneath the blank canvas of sky. When her mother was alive they would spread a yellow cloth, then sit and eat apples. Carol cannot remember anything her mother said, only the sound of her voice, and that she sometimes took off her shoes and unfastened her hair so that it tumbled like ribbon upon her shoulders and neck.

  Carol found some dry branches near the back door and broke the wood into pieces. Then she lit a fire in the stove and mixed flour, baking powder, and the remnants of butter lifted from the dish with her finger. When the fire was really going, Carol used a rag to drop open the stove’s heavy door. Heat flooded the room as she slid in the greasy pan. There was nothing to do after that but sit and wait with her cotton doll, Mary Bright, hoping her father would not return before her biscuits were ready. He said she was too old for the doll, but Mary Bright disagreed and would not be put away. Carol also had to hide the fairy picture she had pinned up by her bed—the one that came alive when the moon breathed on it.

  Fire cracked the bones of sticks. Carol imagined her doll’s bones tucked safely into plump, cotton flesh.

  Then she waited. Staring at flames that flickered on the surface of her eyes. The grease in the pan was melting quickly. The biscuits would rise up from the heat and light. Like Jesus, Carol thought, our savior. She tried to remember his eyes from the Bible pictures at school. But years had passed since she’d sat in the classroom, her feet resting on dusty floor planks.

  The smell of cooking biscuits soon filled the kitchen. Carol imagined hammering, and the reluctant hands of carpenters putting his cross together. The wood had once been just an innocent tree, she thought. Before that, a seed in the earth like a tiny eye about to open.

  Carol stroked her doll’s hair. Jesus had flowing locks, she thought. He loved ever’body, but that wasn’t enough. They killed him anyway. People watched it happen, as though they had something to gain. She thought about those people, wondered where they went after. Home to meals they ate with bare hands? Could they sleep that night after what they had seen? Or did they lay awake in their straw beds, suspended over sleep, crucified themselves by pity for those ebbing bodies on the hill?

  The look on Jesus’s face in the darkness, thought Carol, with no one watching, would have been the pain of disappointment. She knew it well. Maybe all fathers needed forgiving for what they did, or what they didn’t do. Even the good ones, like her granddaddy, whose death, her mother once said, set free the pain he had fought to save them from.

  Carol folded Mary Bright’s apron two times, then three. Tried to feel the numb hands and numb feet that Jesus himself must have felt on that day of his crucifixion. Once they had been children’s feet, small and warm like baking biscuits. It was his momma Carol felt most sorry for. She had promised to keep him safe. He was her little baby. Her pain was the worst of all because it was for someone else. She would just learn to live with it, like a shadow no one else could see.

  Carol’s mother had sewn Mary Bright on the yellow tablecloth with her Singer machine. It was black and heavy, a cannon that spat thread. The yellow tablecloth still covered the hall table. It had stayed the same while everything else in her life slowly unraveled.

  Sometimes Carol lay her cheek upon the surface of the yellow tablecloth, between the ghost of her mother’s elbows.

  She had been gone a long time.

  Carol did not remember much, and so it was not a woman she missed, but a bare foot on the sewing pedal; a voice at the side of her bed; the smell and softness of hair; the spreading of that yellow tablecloth in the woods. Carol’s mother was no longer a person at all, but a collection of moments. A bag of precious stones with different weights and colors gently knocking against her life without breaking.

  After her mother died, Carol felt more like Mary Bright, with eyes to look but never see and arms to reach but never touch. That was when she believed you could talk to spirits, that the dead were webbed into the corners of our lives.

  Carol remembered watching her mother sew Mary Bright through the banisters. It was late at night while her daddy was out playing cards with the money from selling the fields.

  She was so young then. A tangle of bony limbs on stairs. Just staring. Waiting. A moth drawn to the light of her mother’s sewing lamp.

  When the biscuits were ready, Carol pulled out the pan and fumbled with it. Then she carried a cooling biscuit in her dress to th
e porch. She sat down on a broken chair, tearing pieces of hot dough and slipping them into her mouth.

  It must have been close to noon because nothing had much shadow. Then she heard a faint rumbling and her daddy’s truck appeared in the distance. Once he stayed away for several days. She thought he was dead. The happiness she felt must surely have been a sin.

  Her daddy’s truck was a faded green. It crawled over the dirt like a giant beetle. She could feel her heart beating quickly now, and finished the biscuit in her hands. They’d had a horse before the truck. But he always beat it. She could hear it being beaten from her room. Once, it fell down and wouldn’t get up, so he put a knife in its mouth.

  She watched him stop his truck, then sit with his hands on the wheel.

  There were holes in the porch where the wood was rotten. Carol dreamed he would step through one and just keep going. He’d be with the devil then, and her mother would be safe in heaven. If that happened? Her father going to hell through a hole in the porch? Carol knew she’d be just fine, selling fists of foxglove and bluebells for a nickel to people on their way to church. Just sitting there barefoot at the side of the road on a bucket in an old dress with Mary Bright at her side. A flower girl, living on biscuits and well water.

  If her daddy couldn’t walk straight from the liquor, she’d go through the kitchen, grab a biscuit, and run to the woods.

  But his climb down from the cab seemed deliberate. He looked at the house for a moment, then put his hat on. When he got to the porch steps, he came up slowly, then passed his daughter without even a look. Carol wondered if he had died in the night and this was his spirit returning to linger like the taste of something after it’s swallowed.

  Then he came back out, his overalls and boots still on, clutching a biscuit. He sat down on a crate and took a bite. Carol turned her body toward him but knew not to look up—not to look at his mouth kneading the food into a paste.

  Lost bad last night, he said finally, staring out at the rusting machines and tall weeds. Lost so bad that Travis Curt gonna come by in a while to collect his winnuns.

  Carol had both hands on Mary Bright. What he win? The truck?

  Her father ripped at the biscuit with the teeth he had left.

  Not the truck.

  Carol moved her bare feet on the dusty wood. Flattened them. Felt the dirt push on her skin.

  What then?

  Well, what he win was my daughter.

  Carol felt dizzy and sick, as though her soul were trying to pull free of her body. Her father got up. His shadow was small and weak in the noon light.

  Quit your cryin’ and get your stuff together, it’s all been settled, he’s comin’ out today.

  Carol had dreamed of the day she might leave home, get away from her daddy even though she’d drag him like a stone through the rest of her life. She pictured herself working in a store, toiling in a flower patch, or sewing things the way her mother had when she was still alive.

  Her daddy’s mouth stretched, but it was not a smile. I done lost the bet. You know how that works, Carol, and besides, I got plans for your room. I was going over it in the truck—I’m gonna git boarders who can pay me a lil’ bit.

  Carol tucked Mary Bright under her legs.

  Truth be told, you ain’t hardly worth nothin’ to me just sittin’ around. Not like the truck, or the house, or even that barn I’m gonna fix up someday. Those things got uses, Carol, they pay their way, whereas you jus’ take. To be honest, you bin takin’ your whole life. Why, you even took your mother from me—weared her out with all that stretchin’ and kickin’ when you was inside o’her.

  Carol stared at the dumb porch planks. White crumbs had fallen from her biscuit and watched her like tiny eyes.

  She heard him laughing then. Why, you’re too stupid to know when you is better off. Listen, Carol, he’s got hogs, chickens, tobacco, what else—corn! You can eat your fill of corn. Get nice and round. I’ll come visit from time to time—don’t worry about that. You’ll see me, I promise.

  Carol kept her head low as she wept, waiting for the blows that always came as small, bright flashes behind her closed eyes, like the murdering of stars.

  But for some reason he backed away. Carol heard the clunk of his boots and looked. Her father’s head was bowed like a hook.

  It’s me what should be cryin’, Carol, I’m the one who lost something. Take a look around. I don’t see no other daughter but you.

  When Carol’s daddy had made the bet, the four other men at the table fell silent and he felt he’d already won. From that moment, he sensed he would always be above them in some way. Prepared to do things they were not.

  So, when a few moments later his cards fell short, he just couldn’t understand it. His head buzzed with more confusion than anger. The victor, Travis Curt, was sitting there like nothing had happened.

  Carol’s daddy peeled the man with his eyes. Look at him jus’ sittin’ there like a jackass. He’s a winner and don’t even know it. What does that tell you?

  Travis Curt forced a smile and pushed himself away from the table. I jus’ didn’t expect it, is all.

  That ain’t no good prize, Travis, said Old Man Walker, a Cherokee from the hills east of town. Some kid on your property, runnin’ her mouth and takin’ the best of your bacon. I bet she eat like a mule.

  Carol’s daddy spat out some tobacco and said calmly. Well, you’re wrong about that. She hardly eat nothing. You ol’ bastard. You jus’ want her for yourself.

  Old Man Walker claimed he was a child in the Civil War. Had seen men swinging from the covered bridges like ornaments. Bodies black with flies.

  Travis looked at the cards in his meaty hands. Unable to grasp how a person’s life could be decided by the faded drawings of kings and queens.

  He arrived a short time later, as her father had promised.

  His face was red and cologne stung his cheeks where the razor had nicked. There were hornets swarming over a hole in the roof of the house. Travis stood and watched them flit in and out, black dots that from a distance made no sound. Then he listened for voices inside the home but heard nothing. He seemed unsure now how the transaction would take place. He’d only ever traded animals. All he’d needed then was a length of rope and some water.

  When he got up on the porch, the front door was open. Inside he saw a yellow tablecloth spread over a wood table. A pair of bare feet stuck out from beneath. They were young feet, with dirty nails and hairs so soft they were almost invisible.

  Anyone home?

  The table shook as the feet pulled in.

  Hullo there? Travis said.

  When the figure beneath the table didn’t move, Travis went back to his rusted 1929 Model A and honked the horn. Then he stood on the running board, one hand on the wheel for balance.

  After a few moments, there was shouting, and Carol’s daddy appeared on the porch pulling his daughter by her arm. She was sobbing and letting her legs go limp so she’d fall. Her father thought that was funny.

  She actin’ like a trapped ’coon, Travis, but I swear she’s a lady!

  Travis seemed suddenly afraid of what was happening, and was going to call off the bet, when the girl broke free and ran to the barn. Carol’s daddy spat tobacco juice and swung his head with irritation.

  Come on in the house, Travis! So we can discuss this like genl’men.

  They both agreed that at thirteen, she was too young to be married. There weren’t many preachers who’d do it unless she was pregnant, and folks in the town would talk, maybe even tattle to someone from the county seat about their card games.

  It was decided they would tell people she was going to Travis’s farm to cook and clean. Thirteen, they agreed, with a year of schooling was enough for anybody, especially a girl, and so it was acceptable for her to commence this kind of work.

  The two men tried explaining this through the barn door to Carol. It took some effort, but eventually the girl inside believed them and came out.