The Moonlight School Read online

  “The Moonlight School wraps around you like a colorful quilt, planting you soul deep in turn-of-the-century Kentucky. Suzanne Woods Fisher pens an unforgettable story about love and the transforming power of words and community in this remarkable Appalachian-inspired novel. Deeply moving and uplifting!”

  Laura Frantz, Christy Award–winning author of Tidewater Bride

  “The Moonlight Schools by Suzanne Woods Fisher is a captivating story with rich history and engaging characters who pull at your heartstrings. Readers will gladly ride up in the hills with Lucy to get to know the local folks. They’ll cheer on Cora Wilson Stewart as she finds a way to open up the world of reading to people who missed out on proper schooling as children. That the story shares the true historical beginnings of the first Moonlight Schools makes it all that much better. If you like fascinating history mixed with great storytelling the way I do, you’ll love Fisher’s The Moonlight Schools.”

  Ann H. Gabhart, bestselling author of These Healing Hills and An Appalachian Summer

  Novels by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  LANCASTER COUNTY SECRETS

  The Choice

  The Waiting

  The Search

  SEASONS OF STONEY RIDGE

  The Keeper

  The Haven

  The Lesson

  THE INN AT EAGLE HILL

  The Letters

  The Calling

  The Revealing

  AMISH BEGINNINGS

  Anna’s Crossing

  The Newcomer

  The Return

  THE BISHOP’S FAMILY

  The Imposter

  The Quieting

  The Devoted

  NANTUCKET LEGACY

  Phoebe’s Light

  Minding the Light

  The Light Before Day

  THE DEACON’S FAMILY

  Mending Fences

  Stitches in Time

  Two Steps Forward

  THREE SISTERS ISLAND

  On a Summer Tide

  On a Coastal Breeze

  The Moonlight School

  © 2021 by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-2858-8

  Scripture used in this book, whether quoted or paraphrased by the characters, is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published in association with Joyce Hart of the Hartline Literary Agency, LLC.

  Contents

  Cover

  Endorsements

  Novels by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  So . . . What Happened Next?

  Fact or Fiction?

  Recommended Reading about the Life of Cora Wilson Stewart

  Discussion Questions

  A Chapter from The Deacon’s Family Series

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Cast of Characters

  Cora Wilson Stewart: first female superintendent of schools for Rowan County, Kentucky

  Lucy Wilson: second cousin to Cora Wilson Stewart

  Brother Wyatt: raised in the mountains, educated in the city, now a singing school master

  Finley James: mountain boy, aged fifteen, works at the livery, attends Little Brushy School only when he has no choice

  Angie Cooper: mountain girl, grade 8 at Little Brushy School

  Arthur Cooper: father to Angie, trustee of Little Brushy School, owner of the livery in Morehead

  Andrew Spencer: sales agent for Valley View Lumber Company

  Charles Wilson: father to Lucy, husband to Hazel, first cousin to Cora, owner of the Valley View Lumber Company

  Hazel Wilson: Lucy’s very young stepmother

  Mollie McGlothin: elderly mountain woman

  Sally Ann Duncan: young mountain wife

  Glossary

  The accents and pronunciation of mountain talk can seem simple, quaint, or uneducated, but it’s far more complex than one might think. It resembles a Scottish-flavored Elizabethan English dialect spoken long ago. Many of the words, expressions, the phrasing and framework date all the way back to the time of the first great English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century.

  afreared: afraid

  ahr: hour

  a mite: a little

  a’tall: at all

  bar: bear

  book red: educated

  cousined to death: nepotism

  deef: deaf

  far: fire

  haint: ghost

  heered: heard

  holp: help

  idn’t: isn’t it

  if’n: if only

  jolt wagon: a farm wagon, like an oxcart

  laht: light

  nary: none or never

  nigh: near

  nothing never stop: unending

  parts: neighborhood

  pert-near: almost

  pizen: poison

  poke: bag

  retched: reached

  scald: used to describe “exhausted” land

  tolable like: pretty good

  wampish: wiggle

  And just to keep things interesting, there are words that seem to have been invented out of thin air:

  si-goggling: something that isn’t straight

  jasper: stranger

  gaum: all cluttered up

  Prologue

  JANUARY 1901

  TRAIN DEPOT, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

  Lucy Wilson shifted on the wooden bench, hardly aware of the afternoon chill as she waited for Father to return to the station. She was halfway through Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and she sensed a niggling worry about sister Beth’s fragile health.

  Whenever Lucy finished a chapter, she restrained from turning the page and made herself put down the book to check on her own sister, two-and-a-half-year-old Charlotte, who was curled up like a cat on Father’s coat, napping soundly, arms wrapped around a favorite stuffed bear she called Mr. Buttons. Lucy stroked one of her sister’s chubby little white hands and tucked a blonde ringlet away from her round cheek. At moments like this, when Charlotte was sleeping, she could see so much of Mother in her sister’s little face. She pulled the edge of Father’s
coat over Charlotte’s woolen stockings and picked up her book, only to put it down again when she heard the railroad clock chime.

  Two o’clock. Father had been gone for over an hour. He didn’t say when he might return from his business meeting, only that Lucy must keep close watch on her sister. Charlotte was a curious little girl and had an annoying tendency to wander off. Just yesterday, Lucy had caught Charlotte in Mother’s writing room, playing with her jewelry box. She scooped up Charlotte in one arm and gathered the jewelry with her free hand, but when she looked through the jewelry box later, one ring was missing. An anniversary gift Father had given to Mother, a ring of small ruby chips. As soon as they returned home to Lexington, Lucy would resume the hunt for the ruby ring before Father realized it was gone.

  Father had forbidden Lucy and Charlotte to play in Mother’s writing room, though that didn’t stop the girls. One time when cousin Cora had come for a visit, Lucy had overheard Father say it was the one place in the house he could still sense his wife’s presence.

  Lucy felt the same way about the writing room. She could almost smell her mother’s scent, a lavender perfume that she liked to dab behind her ears. The writing room had been left virtually untouched since Mother had died, right down to the quill pen left in the same inkpot, as if she were going to return soon from an errand and pick up a story where she had left off.

  Lucy and Charlotte often sneaked into the writing room after Father had left for work and the housekeeper was busy with the day’s tasks. The room was actually Mother’s dressing room, but she had used it for her writing room because she liked how the corner windows let light stream in all day long. The girls would sit on the floor together, and Lucy would show Charlotte each piece of jewelry and tell stories about Mother. She wanted Charlotte to have memories of their mother, even if imagined ones.

  Lucy missed her mother with all her heart, missed everything about her; her gentle ways, her sparkling laugh, her joy of life. Her mother used to tell Lucy stories, and together they would come up with plot twists or surprise endings. Someday, she told Lucy, they would write a book together. But someday never came.

  Charlotte squirmed in her sleep, and Lucy wiggled her back against the cold bench. When would Father return? He felt the girls were safer waiting here at the station than at a lumberyard, with big saws and horses and wagons and hardened tree fellers.

  She glanced once more at the clock and sighed. Only a few minutes past three, though it felt like hours since Father had left. As long as Charlotte napped, she didn’t mind waiting for Father because she was able to read to her heart’s content. Father didn’t approve of novels, not after Mother died. He said such twaddle softened the brain.

  A train came into the station. Lucy watched dozens of people, all kinds—rich and poor and everything in between—stream out its doors. A young woman stood at a distance, looking at them with a peculiar expression on her face. Lucy realized the woman’s attention was focused on Charlotte. She glanced down at her napping sister and saw her blue eyes open briefly, blinking, before drifting shut as she fell back to sleep. Lucy turned the page to the next chapter in Little Women and was immediately transplanted into the world of Jo and Beth and Meg and Amy, upstairs in their bedrooms, Marmie downstairs in the kitchen with the cook.

  She read a chapter, and then another and another, sobbing as she came to Beth’s tragic death. She knew it! She knew Beth was going to die.

  “Lucy!” Her father’s fierce shout broke through her shell of absorption. “Lucille!”

  She snapped the book shut and stuffed it in her bag before turning to see her father stomp toward her, all buttoned up in his dour black suit, gesturing wildly at her.

  “Lucille!” he shouted again. “Where is your sister?”

  Lucy jerked around to where Charlotte had been sleeping. Father’s coat remained, all bunched up, Mr. Buttons the bear tucked under a sleeve. But her sister was gone. She placed her hand on the spot to see if it was still warm. Stone cold.

  A fear rose in Lucy, a greater fear than she’d ever experienced in her nine years, including that terrible day her mother lay dying.

  One

  MARCH 1911

  LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY

  The train jerked and jolted as it rumbled out of the station. Lucy Wilson stared out the window, watching her neat and tidy world fade into the distance. Watching her well-ordered life, if a bit pedantic and predictable, disappear.

  She placed a hand over her heart and waited for its clamor to calm. Only six months, she reassured herself. She was expected to work for her father’s favorite cousin, Cora Wilson Stewart, for only half a year, then back home she’d go.

  But back home to what?

  To her father’s new wife, Hazel? A young, vivacious woman, scarcely older than Lucy. Hazel wanted to make a home that didn’t cling to the past.

  Back home to Lucy’s charity work among the Lexington matrons, most of whom were twice, if not thrice, her age?

  Back home to Father? Her presence only evoked his sorrow.

  Lucy squeezed her eyes shut. Cora needed stenography help, Father had said, and wouldn’t listen to her objections about a move to Morehead. Cora was superintendent of education for Rowan County, an impoverished area full of—how had Father phrased it?—moonshine and dulcimer pickers. Having grown up there, he should know. But what exactly did a stenographer for a superintendent of education do? Lucy had no idea. She had many accomplished skills from her education at the Townsend School for Girls: from mastering the art of embroidery to conjugating Latin verbs. And so she had dissected the word stenography: from the seventeenth century, Greek roots. Stenos meant “narrow,” graph meant “writing.” The process of taking dictation. That, Lucy thought she could do.

  Outside the window, the landscape had started to change. The train made fewer stops; its tracks wound through rolling green hills, thick with trees. Now and then she would spot a house with a sagging laundry line, but even those were becoming rare.

  Think of this as an adventure, Hazel had suggested. A time to spread wings and gain confidence. Six short months, she reminded Lucy.

  Hazel’s enthusiasm was contagious. Lucy had gone to bed last night with a vow to herself that she would be brave today. Strong and courageous.

  Her bold resolve weakened at the station this morning, and dissolved completely with her father’s last words, said as the train to Morehead arrived: “Don’t disappoint me.” When had she not?

  Then she saw his eyes soften, grow shiny with tears. She’d never been entirely sure he loved her until that moment.

  Perhaps knowing that was worth this. Whatever this—working for Cora—might be. After all, it was only six short months.

  Lucy turned her gaze away from staring out the window and faced forward, ready for what lay ahead.

  MOREHEAD, KENTUCKY

  AS LUCY LIFTED HER HAND to knock on her cousin’s office door, she paused to take in the nameplate: CORA WILSON STEWART, SUPERINTENDENT OF ROWAN COUNTY SCHOOLS. She hadn’t seen much of her father’s favorite cousin in the last few years since she’d been elected as the first female superintendent in eastern Kentucky. Voted in by a substantial majority. Lucy would have voted for Cora, if women could vote. Father wouldn’t have.

  Lucy drew in a deep and satisfying breath, at least as much as the tight strings in her corset would allow. She hadn’t felt this sense of freedom, this sense of possibility, for a very long time. She was excited. Nervous! She had butterflies.

  “She’s not there.”

  Lucy spun around to see a man sitting on a chair on the other side of the hall, one leg crossed over the other, his eyes focused on an open leather-bound book that rested on his knee. A hole was on the sole of his worn-out shoes, and his clothes were shabby. She’d been so focused on finding the right door to Cora’s office that she’d only been dimly aware of him as she walked down the hall. “Are you waiting to see Mrs. Stewart?”

  “Miss Cora? Indeed I am.”

  “How
long have you been waiting?”

  He gazed out the window at the end of the hall. “’Bout an hour.” He set his book—a Bible—on the empty chair next to him, rose to his feet, removed his hat, and folded it to his chest. “When Miss Cora does return, I promise to be quick about my errand.” He extended his hand. “Folks around here call me Brother Wyatt.”

  Lucy took his hand, which had strength to it. She blinked, regarding this man: he was younger than she first assumed, his nearly black hair flowed in ill-kempt waves in need of a cut. His face was etched, with sharp, angular cheekbones. Gray downturned eyes crinkled at their edge in crow’s-feet. Unlike the young men in Lexington, he wore no trimmed mustache. No muttonchop side whiskers. “Are you a circuit preacher?” Father was not a fan of what he derisively called saddlebag preachers. Always looking for handouts and free meals, he said.

  “Not intentionally, though there are times the Lord has asked me to preach his Word. But my true vocation is a singing school master.”

  She’d never heard of such a thing and wondered if he was making it up.

  “I didn’t catch your name.” He gave her a smile, his first. She thought it an oddly poignant one.

  “My name? Lucy. Lucy Wilson.”

  “And what brings you to Miss Cora’s door today?”

  Lucy never liked to give a quick answer to anything. She mulled it over and came up with a clear response that she hoped would discourage more questions. “I’ve come for an employment opportunity with Mrs. Stewart. She’s desperately in need of assistance.”

  Brother Wyatt’s smile faltered, but then he found it again. “Well,” he said, trying to recover from his surprise, but his skepticism was hard to miss. “Well”—he cleared his throat and tried again—“this should be quite . . . an adventure for you.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  His gaze swept her from head to toe. “Miss Cora is not known for coddling her teachers.”

  Coddling? “I’m not here to teach, but to assist Mrs. Stewart,” she said, sounding much braver than she felt. “Short term. Only six months.” Six short months.

  “Two of my favorite people!” came a shriek down the hall. “Lucy! Dear girl!” Striding toward her came Cora, arms outstretched to give her a maternal embrace.