The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [68]
Sam frowned at the memory. “What an awful day. Thank God you were there to get her to the hospital.”
Clark carefully turned onto the gravel road at the top of the hill. “This St. Louis thing is not about real emeralds. It’s a wild goose chase. Jack’s up to some scam, whether he’s working with the law or against it, and he needs Annie to pull it off. She’ll figure that out and she’ll come home.”
“I hope so,” said Sam sadly, sinking back into her seat. She was quiet for a while, looking out at the black Aquene River hurrying along below them.
Clark reached over for her hand. “I know why you want those Peregrine jewels to be real.”
She smiled wanly. “How about, ‘It was a toss-up whether I go in for diamonds or sing in the choir. The choir lost’?”
“Don’t give me Mae West.” He squeezed her hand. “It’s about Jack. It’s about hoping that if your little brother’s after some real jewels, then he isn’t dying. Am I right?”
Sam hugged herself. “Possible.”
Clark clicked the turn signal before the gates of Pilgrim’s Rest, although there was no one else anywhere behind them. “And Jack’s not dying. You’ll see. It’s a big con.”
Sam kept running her fingers along the ridge of an old scar on her forearm, “What I remember most is how he was always trying to make me laugh. He’d jump up and down on my bed and make faces. ‘Come on, Sam, don’t cry, don’t cry.’”
Clark nodded. “I know.”
She stared out the car window at the flat, empty night. “It took a lot to get Jack down. But that goddamn closet, that’s what got to him. Otherwise he could blow off even the tough stuff. Poof, like a dandelion. Dad would take away his allowance, his dinner, Jack would laugh. Dad would lock him in his room, Jack would sneak out the window and crawl along the roof into my room and we’d splice into the TV antenna and watch late night movies together. He would stick his face in front of the screen and act like a hyped-up announcer: ‘Get more out of life, go to the movies!’”
Pulling into the driveway to the house, Clark gave Sam’s hand another slow pat. “You and your movies.”
Sam said she was not to be teased out of her faith that movies showed people how to live their lives with a great score and the boring parts cut out. In movies you could be braver and luckier than in your real life. And better looking. Sam herself, who had watched a movie a day since her adolescence, suspected that without their comfort she might have taken to drink, or worse. Given their Peregrine genes, Sam sighed, Jack and she had really needed Hollywood.
It was true that despite their blessings, the Peregrines had always been a sad family. Most of them were American enough to believe they had a right not to be sad, an inalienable right not only to the pursuit of happiness, but to its capture. So, while a few had skidded down the shale of life without digging in their heels, most Peregrines had died scrabbling at every outcropping they passed along the way—a new job, a new marriage, a drink or a sport or a church or a chance—determined to grab the American dream before they landed at the bottom. Wasn’t it the national story that failure was the fault of those who failed? That if people only got themselves to the right place at the right time, they could find a fortune in emeralds and rubies? That not believing the dream was not to believe in their country?
So for hundreds of years the Peregrine family had lived unhappily on a hundred-plus acres of rich farm land (their slaves did the farming) that had once been the home of the Algonquin ancestors of D. K. Destin, who was always saying that the Peregrines should give the “native As” their land back.
Sam was the first Peregrine to sell off any of the family land. She sold all but ten acres and used the profits to build Clark’s pediatric clinic at Emerald Hospital.
“Best thing I ever did,” she always told the town, who found it hard to believe it could be a happy thing to give away over $3 million worth of land to