Valdosta, Georgia, 1866.
Alice Holliday was dying. Disease had wasted her, taken all the softness from her face, leaving a curious kind of ravaged beauty. Alice the sweet-natured belle had become Alice the Skull: Alice in Hell.
"John," she called, shaping the name into almost two syllables, gulping a necessary small breath in the middle. "John Henry?" She lay deeper in her pillows and coughed damply, exhausted now, but sleepless with fever and breathlessness and pain. The door cracked open, blue-white in the moonlight, letting through a boy who, though at his full height, had yet the rounded lines of childhood.
"Yes, Mama?" A frisson of concern twitched the neatly-drawn features of John Henry's face, caused the full handsome mouth, a copy of his mother's, to tremble slightly. His blue eyes were fantastical in the moonlight.
"Don't you worry, John Henry. I was simply a bit - lonely." Alice reached out her hands in supplication and attempted an ineffectual smile. "Come here to your mama."
He came, as he always did, and pillowed his head upon her bosom from ancient habit, though he was fifteen and Alice's bosom shrank daily as consumption took what it wanted and left the bones behind. She stroked his hair. He is just a boy, she thought. still my own little boy. And he was snuffling softly, like a small frightened child. Alice patted his cheek softly, so lightly it was hardly tangible. "Whatever's the matter, darling?"
"I - don't like to say, Mama."
"Better to have it out, John Henry, than having it upset you always." She rubbed his shoulder briskly.
"Mother - I don't want you to leave me, Mama!" He bit his lip against the animal howl that came from some rarely-tapped place deep inside.
Alice went abruptly cold. She'd known there was no avoiding death, not when she had consumption, but knowing that her son would suffer from her passing was uncomfortably near unbearable. "Hush now." She pulled John Henry closer, and was warmly gratified to feel the boy's arms around her tighten. Mother and son, Alice and John Henry, held to each other for the dear remnants of life.
"Look at that moon, John Henry," Alice whisptered, staring damp-eyed through the window. "Ain't it just as bright as day?"