He sets down his cup and rocks forward, eyes wide with the fever. “When I got up in the morning, what did I see but my own little Lee with that nugget in her chubby hand, banging it on the floor and laughing and kicking out her legs, like she’d found the greatest toy.”

Mama sighs with either remembrance or regret over the first time I divined gold. I was two years old.

He says, “So I re-hid it. This time in the larder.”

“But I found it again, didn’t I, Daddy?” I cover the ramrod in a patch of clean cloth and shove it down the muzzle. It comes out slightly damp, which means I might have faced a nasty backfire the next time I shot.

“Again and again and again. You found it under the mattress, lodged in the toe of my boot, even buried in the garden. That’s when I knew my girl was special. No, magical.”

Mama can’t hold back a moment more. “These are rough times,” she warns as she drops pieces of turnip into the pot. She has a small, soft voice, but it’s sneaky the way it can still a storm. Mostly, the storm she stills is my daddy. “Folks’d be powerful keen to hear tell of a girl who could divine gold.”

“They would, at that,” Daddy says thoughtfully. “Since there’s hardly a lick of surface gold left in these mountains.”

This is why we are not rich, and we never will be. Sure, the Spanish Moss Nugget bought our windows, our wagon, and the back porch addition. But the Georgia gold rush played itself out long ago, and it turns out that not even a magical girl can conjure gold from nothing or lift it from stubborn rock with just her thoughts. We’ve labored hard for what little I’ve been able to divine, and I’ve found less and less each year. Last summer, we diverted the stream and dug up the dry bed until not a speck remained. This year, we attacked the cliff side with our pickaxes until Daddy got too sick.

There’s more gold to be found deep in the ground—my honey-sweet sense tells me so—but there’s only so much two people can accomplish. Daddy refuses to buy slaves; he was raised Methodist, back in the day when the church was against slavery.

Today’s nugget is my first big find in more than a year.

Lord knows we need the money. Which is a mighty odd thing to need, considering that we have a bag of sweet, raw gold dust hidden beneath the floorboards. Daddy says we’re saving it for a rainy day.