Chapter 19 #2
"The cellular camera has a visible antenna and larger housing. A man who knows what he's looking for can spot it. Smash it. Steal it. If that's your only camera, he can keep his face from being seen."
He picked up the basic trail camera and turned it over in his hands.
"This one serves a different purpose. The second camera is hidden at a different tree. Different height. Different angle. If they destroy the first one, the second captures them."
He looked at me.
"They never think to look for two cameras."
We started with the cellular camera. Abner walked the driveway entrance like a general surveying a field of engagement.
He studied angles, checked sightlines, squinted at the road from three different positions.
He chose a Douglas fir twelve feet from the east post, angled to catch vehicles and license plates entering the drive.
"Don't bother hiding this one. Its presence is the deterrent. A man sees a camera and reconsiders his choices."
I strapped it to the tree at chest height, cinching the mounting strap tight, adjusting the angle until Abner confirmed the lens covered the full width of the drive entrance. I powered it on. The indicator light blinked green.
"Now the second."
He led me twenty feet deeper into the treeline on the opposite side, to a tree with low branches heavy with summer foliage. The camera would sit at knee height, concealed under a curtain of leaves, its lens pointed back toward the road at an angle.
"Lower. There. Under that branch."
I strapped it in place. Abner walked back to the driveway and stood where a person would stand coming in from the road. He looked left, right, up. Studied the treeline.
"I can't see it," he said. "Good."
He walked back to me. His breathing was labored from the short walk, but his expression was satisfied.
"Check the cameras in the morning. First light. Make sure the sightlines held overnight and the cellular connection is clear. Now we need to measure the chain to see how much to cut."
I was taking another look at the posts when I heard Abner cough behind me. A hacking spasm, then a sound that was not a cough but a strangled groan.
I turned. Abner had both hands on the side of the truck bed, gripping the edge, his knuckles bone-white. His mouth was open. His chest moved, but the air wasn't reaching wherever it needed to go. The color drained from his face as I watched, tan giving way to the shade of old ash.
I crossed the distance in three strides.
"What can I do?"
He shook his head. The words came in thin, broken fragments between hitches of breath.
"It will... pass."
I stood next to him, close enough to catch him if he fell. I didn't touch him. I waited.
It took a long time. Longer than any episode I'd witnessed.
His chest heaved in shallow spasms, each breath a battle between his lungs and whatever was destroying them.
His forearms trembled from the effort of holding himself upright against the truck.
Sweat broke across his forehead in a wet sheen.
When it finally eased, the change was visible in every part of him. His face stayed gray. His hands shook when he released the truck bed. He looked years older.
I poured the last of the iced tea into the thermos cap and put it into his hands. He drank in small sips, his fingers rattling the plastic against his lower lip.
"I'll take you back to the cabin. We can measure the chain later. You can rest on the porch until you get your wind back."
I expected the refusal. The straightened shoulders, the Shakespeare quote, the assertion that he was perfectly capable of helping me with the gate.
Abner just nodded.
That silent acceptance frightened me more than the coughing had.
I helped him into the passenger seat. He leaned against the door and closed his eyes while I drove back to the cabin. I parked close to the porch steps and came around to his side.
When I opened the door, he swung his legs out and put his boots on the ground, but didn't stand.
I offered my arm. He took it. His full weight came onto me as he rose, and I felt how light Abner was.
We climbed the porch steps together, one at a time. His boots scraped the wood. I lowered him into the camp chair and he sank into it like a man returning to bed after a long illness.
I poured water from the insulated pitcher I kept on the porch into a tin cup and set it on the arm of the chair. Abner sat with his eyes closed. The wheeze was constant now, a thin high sound on every exhale.
"I know you're against seeing a doctor," I said. "But maybe it's time to get some help with the breathing."
He shook his head without opening his eyes.
"All I need is rest. Maybe a little whiskey when I get home. I appreciate your concern, Thomas. Truly. But this will pass. It always does."
The words were the same ones he'd given me before. The refusal I'd heard twice, three times. But they sounded different now. Weaker and less certain.
I nodded reluctantly and sat in the other chair. I watched the treeline and said nothing because the man beside me had the right to his own choices. But respecting that right sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't shift.
Scout came out of the woods behind the cabin. She waved, her whole arm sweeping the air, and smiled.
Then she saw her father.
The smile vanished. She covered the distance at a run, her boots drumming the packed earth, and dropped to her knees beside the camp chair. She took Abner's hand in both of hers.
"Father, what happened?"
"The heat and the exertion caused a spell of bad coughing." His voice was level and measured, the performance of a man intent on reassuring his daughter. "I'll be fine."
"You don't look fine."
"My appearance will improve with rest. And maybe a sip of whiskey."
Scout looked at me. I held her gaze and said nothing, but she read what she needed to in my face.
"I'll help you home," she said.
"No, I'll drive you both," I offered. "We'll go around through the woods road."
"I assure you, I can walk my own route," Abner said. "Through my own woods."
He placed both hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself upright. It took everything he had. I watched the effort move through his body.
He straightened. Lifted his chin. Set his shoulders square. An act of pure will performed by a man who would not leave another man's porch looking diminished.
Scout offered her arm. Abner took it. His hand settled in the crook of her elbow with a softness that contrasted with the rigid posture of the rest of him.
At the top of the steps, he turned back.
"The Knox padlock goes on the south post. Leave enough slack in the chain for it to drop flat. Don't forget."
"I won't forget."
"Check the cameras at first light. Confirm the sightlines."
"I will, Abner. First thing."
He nodded. His blue eyes held mine for a moment.
"I'll be going home now."
I watched them descend the steps and cross the clearing toward the treeline.
Scout walked steadily beside her father, matching his pace, her arm supporting his weight.
Their shadows stretched long in the afternoon sun.
Abner's gait was slow but deliberate, each step placed with the care of a man crossing a fast-moving stream.
They were ten yards from the trees when it happened.
Abner pitched forward. The coughing tore out of him with a violence I hadn't heard before, deep convulsive spasms that doubled him at the waist.
Scout grabbed him with both arms. His knees buckled. He went down, pulling her with him, and she caught him and lowered him as gently as she could, but he hit the ground hard and rolled onto his back.
"Father? Breathe, Father! Breathe!"
I ran. The distance closed in seconds, but it felt longer.
Abner was on his back in the grass, his chest heaving in rapid, ineffective contractions.
His face had gone past gray to something closer to blue.
His mouth opened and closed. His hands clawed at the grass on either side of him, fingers digging into the earth.
Scout kneeled beside him with her hands on his chest. The composure she'd held together on the porch, at the chair, on the walk across the clearing, was gone. Her face was open and raw with a fear I'd never seen in her before.
"We need to call an ambulance," I told her.
She looked down at her father, at the man who had lived without grid power for fifteen years rather than submit to a system that had failed him.
The man who had raised her alone in the woods and taught her to shoot and read Steinbeck and butcher a deer and live by a code so rigid that it was now suffocating him as surely as his own lungs.
"This is too much, Father. We need to get help."
Abner's eyes found his daughter's face. His chest heaved. No air came. His hands stopped clawing at the grass and went still. He shook his head, No.
But Scout was not accepting that answer. This time, she was not following Abner's instructions. Instead, Scout was doing what her father had always taught her to do-- the right thing.
"You need medical attention, Father. I'm going to see you get it."
Something moved in his expression, a recognition of things that had never been spoken between them before. A faint smile ghosted his lips.
Abner nodded. Scout looked at me.
"Do it."
I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed 911. The line connected. The ringtone pulsed once then twice in the bright afternoon air.