Moon Over Manifest

Abilene cleans her face and hands in a creek she finds on the way to the depot, where she then looks for Pastor Howard. Abilene says he helped her father, who doesn’t trust very many people. While walking toward the depot, she remembers playing a rhyming game with her father where they would exchange sentences that rhymed with each other. On her path, she reaches a gate covered in welded decorations. The word over the gate says “PERDITION” in slightly warped letters (9). She knows the word from sermons and that it means a place of eternal suffering, and she wonders why anyone would want the word on their gate. She moves on from the old house, quietly rhyming to herself aloud. As she comes to a cemetery, she quietly rhymes aloud, “I once had a horse and his name was Fred. He ran all day, then—.” She hears something crunch behind her. A man’s voice says, “He dropped dead” (10).

A thin man named Shady Howard asks Abilene if the compass he is holding belongs to her. He is the “interim pastor” (12), and he’s been in Manifest for 14 years. They go into town so he can pick up a letter from Hattie Mae Harper. Abilene knows about her, thinking of the newspaper from the compass box.

Abilene thinks the town looks gray and sad, as if Manifest is a symbol of the Great Depression. It reminds her of her father. When they talk to Hattie Mae at her office, she says Abilene can come help her sort her old articles for storage. She also offers Abilene any old newspapers she wants, in case she’s in the mood to read or study the town’s history. Among headlines about Babe Ruth, the Depression, and Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight, Abilene sees a headline about alcohol being illegalized in Kansas in 1917, the year her father was in Manifest. She wonders if she can learn about him through the articles. Abilene overhears her telling Shady, “She needs to know” (16), but Abilene doesn’t ask what he means.

Hattie Mae changes the subject when she sees Abilene and wishes her a good time at school the next day, to Abilene’s astonishment. It will be the last day of school, and Hattie Mae and Shady want her to meet some of the other kids in town. In protest, Abilene says her father will come get her before the next school year, so she doesn’t need to attend the last day. She notices that Hattie Mae and Shady seem uneasy at her comment.

Shady looks at Hattie Mae’s typewriter that needs to have the “R” and “L” letters fixed, and Abilene realizes what Shady meant by picking up a letter. When Abilene sees Shady’s home, it looks like it’s “one part saloon, one part carpenter’s shop, and […] one part church” (18). Pews and stained-glass windows are being stored there because the First Baptist Church burned down years earlier. Shady says the fire is why the pastor left.

She sees footprints on the dusty floor and wonders if any of them match her father’s feet. Before bed, she wonders why her father trusts Shady. Upstairs in her room, she’s surprised at the luxury of water and a basin for washing the dust off of her body and remembers to hide her keepsake sack before falling asleep. She takes an envelope from the sack that shows an address in Des Moines, Iowa, which she has memorized. She takes the compass out and prepares to hide the bag under a floorboard. When she pulls back the floorboard, she finds a cigar box already hidden there. It’s filled with letters, but it’s too dark to read them, so she hides her bag next to it.

When Shady says goodnight, she asks him how far it is to Des Moines. He says it’s closer than the moon and that the people in Des Moines are looking at the same moon.

In the morning, Shady calls Abilene for breakfast before she can read the letters. She eats by his workbench, where he is working on Hattie Mae’s letter “L.” She doesn’t want to go to school since it’s the last day before summer. Shady gives her a “P” and a “Q” to deliver to Hattie Mae for him.

Abilene thinks that being the new kid never gets easier. A girl named Soletta Taylor says Abilene is probably an orphan. Abilene replies that her mother is in the “sweet by and by” (26). She doesn’t know what the phrase means, but she can’t be sure that it’s not the truth since she thinks no one knows for certain what the phrase means. What she says she does know is that her mother left when she was two years old to join a New Orleans dance troupe.

She notices that the children seem to pity her when she says her father’s coming at the end of summer. A girl named Ruthanne asks Abilene to tell her story. When she mentions Shady’s place, Charlotte says Abilene lives near a “den of iniquity” (29). When asked where her home is, Abilene says her father says their home is not on a map because true places never are. Sister Redempta, a nun who is their teacher, knows this is a quote from Moby Dick. Abilene thinks that Sister Redempta is not a universal. Abilene assigns people, places, and rules into categories she calls universals, which are facts that she assumes to be true in advance.

When Sister Redempta passes out final grades, Sister Redempta gives Abilene a summer assignment after calling her name. She must write a story on a topic of her choosing over the summer, and the assignment is due on September 1. After two classmates are assigned to help Abilene, a girl named Charlotte also offers to help, adding that she can help Abilene find better clothes. Abilene thinks Charlotte is a universal “snooty rich girl” (32).

Abilene takes the box of letters to Shady’s decrepit tree house. From her perch, she watches Lettie and Ruthanne go into a drugstore nearby. A plaque in the tree house says “FORT TREECONDEROGA” (34). Abilene opens the box she found beneath the floorboards. There is a homemade map of the town. There are also various mementos: “A cork, a fishhook, a silver dollar, a fancy key, and a tiny wooden baby doll” (35). When she opens a letter, it is addressed to “Dear Jinx” (35), which means it’s not her father’s letter.

The letter is from someone named Ned Gillen and is dated January 15, 1918. In the letter, Ned apologizes to Jinx for leaving. Ned made the map and left the mementos for Jinx. The letter also mentions the possibility of spies in Manifest and says, “THE RATTLER is watching” (37).

Lettie and Ruthanne call out for Abilene and climb up to meet her. They have sandwiches and sodas, but Abilene says she can’t work on her assignment at the moment. They say they are just there to visit, and she believes them. They tell her about a woman who sits on her porch and can turn people to stone. Abilene asks if they have ever seen a spy map.

Lettie is thrilled about the possibility of a spy. They compare the Rattler to the Shadow from the Sunday night radio program. They ask a few businessmen about the Rattler, but no one knows who they mean. When they see the undertaker, Mr. Underhill, they follow him to the cemetery, where he lies on his back between two graves, as if taking measurements. Then he makes a few notes and leaves.

When they return, there is a note nailed to the trunk of the tree house. It says, “Leave Well Enough Alone” (9). They think the Rattler is still in Manifest. When she is alone, Abilene returns to the cemetery after realizing that she lost her compass again.

On the way back, when she passes the gate that says “PERDITION,” she realizes this is what Charlotte called “Miss Sadie’s Divining Parlor” (49). Abilene sees that her compass is hanging with the windchimes on the porch. She stands on a pot to get it, but she slips and the pot breaks. A figure stands from the chair on the porch, and Abilene runs.

The next day, when Abilene tells Shady about her friends, he says to invite them to church and the potluck that evening. While cleaning the bar top, Abilene sees that there is a secret panel in the bar. She begins to think of speakeasies—secret bars that served alcohol during prohibition. She sees a bottle and wonders why there’s only one bottle of alcohol in the building.

When she returns to Miss Sadie’s, the compass is gone. Abilene enters the parlor and sits with Miss Sadie. She gives her a dime to tell her fortune. When Miss Sadie asks what she needs, Abilene says she’s looking for her father. Miss Sadie asks for a bauble, which may help her locate him. She gives Miss Sadie Ned’s letter.

Miss Sadie’s hands shake when she reads it. She asks if Abilene has the mementos mentioned in the letter. As if in a trance, she says that there is a boy who is tired and hungry. He is on a train and must make a leap of faith.

Miss Sadie narrates Jinx and Ned’s adventures in third person.

Jinx jumps from a train and walks until he is near a creek. He hears a girl’s voice scolding someone named Ned Gillen. After she leaves, Jinx sees Ned holding a fish on a line. He thinks they were arguing about Ned fishing instead of spending time with her. Jinx remembers the sound of growling dogs and the sheriff’s voice the night before. He’s hungry, so he steps into sight and asks about the catfish.

Jinx shows Ned a bottle of liquid and says it will solve all of his problems and help him with his scent, which will be better than the smell of fish. Ned trades Jinx for the catfish, and Jinx washes in the creek. He thinks about his uncle Finn, who insisted that they separate after an incident in Joplin. Jinx thinks that he felt free after separating from his uncle, although he worries about the body in his past. He thinks about how his uncle said that a sheriff wouldn’t believe them. While thinking about his next destination on his travels, he sees Ned scrubbing off the cologne in the creek nearby. They hear a gunshot and run back to the bank, where they find that someone has taken their clothes. Nearby, they see a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. They burn Ned and Jinx’s clothes for their fire while Ned tells Jinx about the KKK’s brief history in the area.

The man who burned their clothes is Buster Holt. He is with Elroy Knabb; Arthur Devlin, who owns the coal mine; and his enforcer, Lester Burton. Ned tells Jinx that Manifest is made up of immigrants who work the mines. As they talk, Ned reveals that he doesn’t know where he was born, but a man named Hadley Gillen adopted him. Jinx takes the robes of two Klan members who are in the creek. He and Ned don the robes and join the group, but Lester Burton stops them. They tease the men about having raggedy hems on their robes, implying that their robes would look more fashionable if the KKK had more women as members.

Jinx and Ned go to a cabin with them. Jinx sneaks away to the outhouse, which has a line of Klan members waiting. There is no toilet paper, so Jinx replaces the substituted leaves with poison ivy.

Frustrated that she heard a story about two strangers instead of a story about her dad, Abilene wants her dime back. She thinks Miss Sadie made up the story about Jinx and Ned. Miss Sadie asks her to get ointment for her swollen leg, which was injured on barbed wire. She specifically needs Hawthorn root. She also denies that she stole the compass. She says she found it in her yard, and she wants the matter settled about her broken pot. Somehow, she knows Abilene still has one coin in her pocket. Abilene agrees to work jobs for Miss Sadie to pay off the broken pot. On her way out, she sees her compass on a nail near the door but doesn’t take it, knowing she must make amends for the broken pot first.

At Shady’s, she looks at a lure from the box of mementos. It says, “WIGGLE KING—SO COLORFUL IT’LL CATCH A BLIND FISH” (72). She wishes she’d never gone to Perdition.