Chapter 4 #3
And Francis Deckham stood in his own yard, in front of his own farm, with his son hidden in the dark beneath his feet and ten shotguns in reach, and he looked at the soft warlord with the black pistol on his hip, and he understood exactly what this was.
It was not about push-ups. It was never about the push-ups.
It was about breaking him. In front of everyone. Making him kneel. Teaching every watching soul on this farm, and Macklemore's own men too, that the man of this place was a thing that got down in the dirt when the soft man said get down.
Grey said do it. Grey said get down, do the push-ups, eat the dirt, live to fight another day, a man on his knees is a man still breathing, the whole play is to survive this and be underestimated and become the wrong answer to the fast math.
Earl would say do it. Don't fight what you can walk away from. Swallow it. Live.
But Ruth's voice was in his head too now, the newer voice, the eight and a half, the flinch, the missing point and a half.
The conviction. And some other thing, some deeper thing, some line that had been bending in Francis for six months, the same line that had held one morning in a suburban yard when a woman screamed and he could not walk past it.
Because he understood, standing there, that a man who got down in the dirt on the first day, in front of his son's hiding place, in front of the people he was asking to braid their lives to his, would never, ever get back up in their eyes.
That some things you could not walk away from, because walking away from them was its own kind of dying.
That there was a cost to kneeling too, and it was paid in a currency Francis had only one of.
He thought of Junior in the dark below. The boy could not see him. That was the one mercy. The boy could not see whatever happened next.
But Francis would know. Francis would always know, for the rest of his life, whether he had knelt.
"No," Francis said.
The word came out flat and quiet and it surprised no one more than it surprised him, and it dropped into the yard like a stone into a still pond.
Macklemore's soft face went very still.
"No?" he said.
"I'll register," Francis said, keeping his voice level, keeping it reasonable, keeping it grey even now, giving the soft man a road that wasn't murder.
"I'll take your paper. I'll talk about the harvest. But I'm not doing push-ups in my own yard for your entertainment. That's not compliance. That's a show. And I'm not going to put on a show. There's nothing in it for either of us. You want a producer, you've got one.
You don't need me on my knees to get your share in the fall."
For a long moment Stanley Macklemore just looked at him.
And then, almost sadly, almost gently, he shook his head.
"That's the wrong answer, insurance man," he said. "I really hoped it wouldn't be." He looked past Francis, at one of his men, a big one with a pump shotgun, and he gave the smallest tilt of his soft head. "Teach him."
Francis saw it coming and there was nothing he could do about it.
The big man crossed the space fast, and Francis got half a step, half a turn, and then the man reversed the shotgun and swung the wooden stock of it around in a short brutal arc and it caught Francis across the side of the head with a sound like an axe hitting a log.
The world went white.
Then it went sideways.
Francis was on the ground. He did not remember falling.
The yard was tilted and bright and roaring and there was grass against his cheek and a high thin whine in his ears drowning out everything, and pain, enormous pain, a great white bell of it ringing through his skull, and he could not make his arms work, could not make the ground stay still,
could not do anything but lie there with his face in the dirt of his own yard while the sky spun.
From very far away, through the roaring, he heard Macklemore's mild pleasant voice.
"There," the soft man said. "Now you're down in the dirt anyway. Only difference is now you're down my way instead of yours. Remember that, insurance man. It's the only lesson that matters out here. You go down my way, or you go down my way. Those are the only two choices you ever get."
Francis lay in the grass and could not answer. The world pulsed white and dark, white and dark. He was distantly aware of shapes moving, of Maya's voice somewhere shouting, held back, of Ruth's face swimming above him, of blood, warm, running down into his eye.
"You've got till harvest," Macklemore's voice came, drifting, fading, as the trucks' engines turned over one by one.
"I'll be back in the fall to collect. Have my share ready, insurance man. All of it. Counted and clean. And you tell that old bitch that if I hear one more word out of her, one more, I'll do to this place what I did to hers."
A pause. Soft. Final. "You know I will. She'll have told you. You know exactly what I'll do."
The engines growled. The trucks pulled away.
And Francis Deckham lay in the dirt of the farm he had bled for, his skull cracked open and ringing, the world going white and dark around him, and the last thing he heard before it all closed over into black was his son's muffled voice,
rising thin and frantic and terrified from the cellar beneath the ground, calling for him.
"Dad? Dad? Dad, what happened? DAD?"