My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: The Settling
The Miners' Union Hall held four hundred people on Christmas Eve, and I counted them from the stage steps.
I stopped at three hundred and eighty, because the doors were still opening.
It was a long hall with a stamped tin ceiling, a stage at one end with a green curtain, and rows of folding chairs filled with every face on the hill.
The bar owners sat in the front.
The lay-away families sat behind them, in their good coats, with children on their knees.
The old men of both churches sat on a long bench at the side, in black, with their hats on their laps.
Bram sat at a table below the stage with his thermos in front of him.
He wore a charcoal suit and a red tie for the season.
Dermot sat three chairs down, in the same clean shirt, with his cap in his lap.
Cormick sat at the far end of the head table, in the black coat, with his hands flat on the cloth.
He did not look at me.
I knew now why, and it was not the old reason.
It was so that nobody could say I had taken my courage from his face.
The oldest of the old men rose, a thin man with a face like a walnut, and rapped a cane on the floor.
"We're here to settle a bond," he said. "As the old custom gives. Mr. Dacey has asked the hill whether the bond between Cormick Lanigan and Maeve Tierney is soft. Mr. Dacey will speak."
Bram stood.
He did it beautifully.
He buttoned his jacket and stood with one hand on the thermos, and when he spoke it was in the warm, sorry voice I had heard at a hundred funerals.
"Friends," he said. "I've known most of you all my life, and I never wanted to stand here."
He told them about thirty years of friendship.
He told them about the old boss on his deathbed.
He said that a Holder had been seen in the street holding a bonded girl's hand, and that a Holder had gone up the mountain with her in a snowstorm and kept her three nights.
He said it with such sadness that I saw two women in the second row wipe their eyes.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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