Chapter 6 #3
He looked at Nathan. Nathan looked back, and in the starlight Francis saw the weathered man's face, and saw that Nathan's gut had been right all along, dead right, the gut that had kept him alive.
Not a Combine scout. Not an enemy counting their defenses.
A scared, alone, starving kid who had spent a whole winter watching a family from a ridge and had fired a round to warn them about strangers on their road.
"All winter," Francis said quietly. "You've been out there all winter. Alone. Watching us. Why? Why watch us and never come down? Why not come to the door?"
And the girl's hard defiant face cracked, just for a second, and under it Francis saw the whole terrible truth of her, and it was so familiar it hurt.
"Because I didn't know if you were safe," she said.
Her voice dropped, went small. "You don't just walk up to people anymore. You don't. That's how you die. I watched you all winter trying to figure out if you were the kind of people who'd take a kid in or the kind who'd." She stopped.
Her hands were shaking. "I saw you had a little boy. I saw you fed him. I saw the nurse fix up that sick lady. I saw you didn't shoot me the times I got close, the times you could have. I've been trying to work up the nerve for weeks. To come down. To ask.
But every time I got close I couldn't do it, because if I was wrong, if you were the other kind, then that was it, I was dead, and I've been staying alive so long, so hard, and I couldn't."
Her voice broke completely. "I couldn't make myself walk up to strangers and find out. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the wire, I'm sorry about the shot, I wasn't gonna hurt anybody, I swear to God, I just didn't know how to."
And Francis Deckham, kneeling in the cold grass, understood exactly, completely, all the way to the bottom.
Because he had been her. Not a girl, and not fifteen, but her.
He had stood at the bottom of a stairwell and read three men and their friendly voices.
He had lain in a dark house too scared to trust an old man who set his gun down.
He knew, in his bones, the exact terror of it, the impossible arithmetic of the new world, where the only way to stop being alone was to walk up to strangers and gamble your life that they were good, and where getting it wrong meant dying,
and where the fear of getting it wrong could keep you alone in the cold on a ridge for a whole winter, starving, watching a warm house full of the very thing you needed most.
Together is a chance, Earl had said. But God, the courage it took to reach for the together.
The courage to walk down the hill. This girl had spent a winter not able to find it, and Francis could not, would not, hold that against her, because he knew exactly how heavy that courage was, how many people it had killed to look for it and how many more it had killed to lack it.
"What's your name," Francis said gently.
The girl looked at him a long moment, deciding, the last gamble, whether to give a stranger her name.
"Nell," she said finally. "It's Nell."
"Nell." Francis nodded slow. "Okay, Nell. Here's what's true, and I don't lie, so you can believe it. You watched us right. You read us right. We are the kind of people who take a kid in.
There's a little boy up in that house who lost his mother two months ago and I would burn the world down before I'd let anybody hurt him, and there's a girl about your age, younger, who walked eleven days to get here, and there's an old woman who knows how to make dirt grow food,
and a nurse who fixes people, and every single one of us knows exactly what it is to be alone and scared and not able to walk down the hill."
He held her eyes. "You don't have to be on that ridge anymore. You don't have to watch us through the dark and wonder. You can come in. There's a fire, and there's food, and there's people who won't hurt you. That's not a trick. I've got no reason to trick a starving kid with a hunting rifle.
You can just. Come in. Be warm. Be done being alone. If you want it."
Nell stared at him.
And then the hardness that had kept her alive all winter, the terrible held-together hardness of a child surviving where children shouldn't have to, all of it collapsed at once, the way Francis's own had collapsed in an alley the night Earl died,
and she put her thin dirty hands over her face and she wept.
She wept the way you weep when you've been holding it for months.
Great heaving silent sobs, her whole starved frame shaking with them, and Francis did not touch her, because you did not touch a spooked animal, but he stayed close, and he stayed low, and he let her cry it out, the whole frozen winter of it,
in the fold of ground where they'd meant to trap a ghost and had found a child instead.
Nathan lowered his rifle all the way. Cole, hard-faced Cole who moved like water and had done things he wouldn't name, looked away, out at the dark, his jaw tight, and Francis understood that whatever Cole had lost, whoever Cole had lost, it had maybe been about this age, and Cole could not watch.
After a while, the worst of it passed, the way it always did, grief in the new world a luxury with a short clock on it.
"Come on, Nell," Francis said softly. "Come in out of the cold. You've watched us long enough to know it's warm in there. Come find out you were right about us."
And Nell wiped her face with a ragged sleeve, and looked at him with red raw eyes, and nodded, and let herself be helped up, a fifteen-year-old girl who had survived a winter alone that would have killed grown men, finally, finally coming down off the ridge.
They brought her in.
They walked her up through the dark to the house, and Francis went ahead and woke Ruth and Maya so there'd be women there, so the girl wouldn't come into a house full of strange men, and by the time they got Nell inside there was Ruth with her steady old face and Maya with her nurse's hands,
and the two of them took one look at the starved terrified girl and folded her in without a word, the way women who have survived things fold in a child who has survived things.
Maya got food into her, slow, careful, the way you feed the starving so it doesn't hurt them.
Ruth got a blanket around her thin shoulders.
And Nell sat by the wood stove, in the warmth, in the light, surrounded by people, and Francis watched her hands slowly stop shaking as she understood, deep down where it counted, that she had made it, that the gamble had paid, that she was not going to die on a ridge in the cold, alone, at fifteen.
Junior woke, and came to the doorway, rubbing his eyes, and saw the strange girl by the fire, and Francis watched his son take her in, the hollow cheeks, the hacked hair, the raw eyes.
"Are you new?" Junior asked. Simple. An eight-year-old's directness.
Nell looked at the small boy in the doorway, the fed, safe, sleepy boy, and something moved across her ruined face, something that Francis thought might have been the first edge of hope she'd let herself feel in a long time.
"Yeah," Nell said, her voice rough from crying. "I guess I am."
"Okay," Junior said, and yawned, and accepted it with the total ease of a child, one more person, one more member of the strange growing family, and went back to bed.
And Francis stood in the warm crowded farmhouse in the deep of the night and looked around at all of them.
Junior and Sofia asleep. Ruth and Maya tending the new girl.
Nathan and Cole, the hard men, standing easy now by the door.
Doreen recovering in the corner. All of Ruth's people, folded in over the days. And now Nell, off the ridge at last.
Nineteen of them now. Nineteen souls under one roof at the end of a long road at the end of the world.
Alone is death. Together is a chance.
The braid was thickening. Strand by strand, exactly as Ruth had said.
And Francis felt it, the growing weight and the growing strength of it, both at once, more people to protect and more hands to protect with, and he thought about the harvest coming, and the fuel, and the trucks, and Stanley Macklemore's soft patient face,
and he understood that he was building something now.
Not just surviving. Building. A thing worth defending. A thing worth all of it.
But later, much later, lying awake beside his sleeping son with the ache still pulsing in his cracked skull, one thing Nell had said came back to him, and it would not leave, and it turned the warm night cold again.
She'd been watching them all winter. Watching the whole plain, really, from that high ridge, with her hunter's patience and her rifle and her long lonely vigil.
Which meant Nell had seen things. From up there. Things Francis hadn't.
And in the morning, Francis thought, staring at the dark ceiling, in the morning he was going to sit that girl down and ask her, very carefully, exactly what else she had seen this winter, from her ridge, out across the plain.
How many farms. How many people. How many trucks.
Where the Combine went and when and how often.
Because a girl who had spent a winter watching everything from the high ground was not just one more mouth to feed.
She was a map.
She was the most valuable thing that had walked onto this farm since Ruth. She was eyes on the whole plain, a season of patient reconnaissance already done, sitting right there by his fire eating soup.
And Francis was going to need every inch of what was behind those raw red eyes if nineteen people were going to live through the harvest that was coming.