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.
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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.