Chapter 7 #4
He filed it. The claims mind never stopped filing. Somewhere down the line, he suspected, Dale Crotinger was going to walk back into this. Names like that always did.
But he let it lie. For now.
"Here's what I want, then," Francis said, shifting, letting the wall stand. "That gun stays on you. On your hip, in the open, from tonight on. Not wrapped in oilcloth under my sink where it does nobody any good and I don't even know it's there."
Ruth looked down at the holster settled on her hip.
"You're not going to ask me to put it in a common pile," she said. "With the shotguns and the rest. For everybody to share."
"No," Francis said. "It's yours. You've carried it years, you know it better than any of us ever could, and a gun's worth is in the hand that holds it.
That forty caliber is worth ten of anything else on this farm because it's got your hands on it and your summer of a hundred rounds a week behind it. It'd be a waste and worse than a waste to hand it to somebody who'd have to learn it under fire."
He met her eyes. "So it stays with you. But it comes out of hiding. That's the deal. We're trying to be one thing here, not a bunch of people with secrets under each other's sinks. You keep your Dale. That's yours, and I'll not touch it.
But the gun that might end that fat man's life or save my boy's, that one lives in the light now. Where we can all count on it."
Ruth held his gaze a long moment.
Then she nodded, and it was a real nod, a settling of something, another strand pulled tight in the braid Ruth herself had told him they were weaving, thick and tangled, so nobody could betray anybody without cutting their own throat.
"In the open," she said. "All right, insurance man. In the open. From tonight."
She patted the holster once more, and it stayed on her hip, and it would stay there, Francis understood, every day from here on out. An old woman and her Glock, no longer a secret. Part of the thing they were building.
"God help Stanley Macklemore," Ruth said quietly, almost to herself, "if he ever backs me into a corner. I've been saving this gun for a man exactly like him my whole life. I bought it for a reason and I learned it for a reason and I've carried it thirty years waiting for a reason.
I just never had a face to put on the reason. Now I do."
Her thumb rested on the grip. "Now I do."
Nathan, by the door, looked from the old woman to Francis, and something passed over his weathered face, something between respect and unease.
"We're really doing this," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"The old woman's wearing her gun in the open. The girl off the ridge is drawing us maps of the enemy. We're planting a field on purpose to draw a warlord out. We're talking about raising a rebellion across a hundred miles of ground he owns. We are actually, truly, going to fight the Combine."
He shook his head slow. "Six months ago I was one man alone in a ditch. Now look."
"Now look," Francis agreed.
"It's madness," Nathan said. But there was something under it, something that wasn't quite fear anymore.
"You know that. Nineteen of us. A cracked-skull insurance man, an old woman with forty bullets, a fifteen-year-old, an ex-con nurse, whatever Cole did before, me, a boy, some tired farmers, and a bunch of kids and sick folks. Against trucks and guns and a man who makes examples of people.
It's madness."
"It's madness," Francis said. "And it's the only thing that isn't suicide. Because complying is slow suicide, Nell's family proved it, Ruth's proved it. And running is giving up the one good place and dying on the road. So madness it is. We fight. We just fight smart. Grey.
We don't stand up and trade guns with him, we'd lose in a minute. We pull the one thread. We take his fire's wood away. We do the impossible quiet thing."
He looked between them. "And the first piece of the impossible quiet thing is me, walking out of here alone, onto his ground, to find the numbers we don't have. That starts soon. Days, not weeks."
Nathan was quiet.
"You know what that means," he said. "Leaving. The boy."
"I know exactly what it means," Francis said, and his voice went low and rough. "I've been carrying it since you said it at the table. Don't think I haven't."
Ruth stood, old bones unfolding slow, the gun riding easy on her hip now, out of hiding, part of her.
"Then here's the last thing I'll say tonight," she said, "and then I'm to bed. When you go out there, Francis, you go grey. All the way grey. Greyer than you have ever been in your life. Because out there is worse than the city ever was. Out there is Combine ground,
and every farm on it has already sold its soul once to stay alive, and any one of them might sell yours to buy another season of safety. You'll be carrying nineteen lives in your pocket,
walking through a country full of frightened people who would trade every single one of them for a full belly and a promise that the trucks won't come for them."
Her pale eyes held his. "One slip. One family that decides turning you in is worth it. And it's over. Not just for you. For all of us. Junior included."
The name landed in the quiet kitchen like a stone.
"Can you do it," Ruth asked. "Leave that boy. Walk onto killing ground. Be nobody. And come home?"
And Francis thought about his son asleep in the next room, the new tooth just coming in, the laugh that came before the joke was done, the small hand that had gripped his and held him together when he came up out of the dark with his skull cracked open.
And he thought about a concrete floor. About Cheryl's cold hand and her clear terrible eyes. About the promise. Keep him alive. At all costs.
And he understood, with the cold clarity that had been growing in him since the yard, that the only way left to keep that promise was to leave.
To walk away from the one thing he loved most, out onto the most dangerous ground in the world, and gamble everything on being unseen.
Because staying and hiding only meant they all died together when the leaves turned.
"I can do it," Francis said.
And he believed it.
Mostly.
But somewhere far down, in the place Ruth had once graded at eight and a half, in the half-second flinch she'd seen and named, a small cold voice asked whether a man could truly walk away from his only son, onto ground where the Combine made examples of children, and stay grey enough,
stay nobody enough, stay alive enough, to ever walk back.
He didn't answer it.
He wouldn't give it the words.
He got up instead, and said his goodnights, and went to sit by his sleeping boy in the dark, the way he did every single night, and he watched Junior breathe, small and safe and warm, and he thought about all the ways a father could walk out a door and never come back through it.
And then, because he was the grey man, because a leader could not let the fear show even to himself, he put it away where it couldn't be seen, folded it down small and locked it deep, the way he'd learned to do with everything that could break him.
Tomorrow they would plant the bait field.
And then Francis Deckham would begin, quietly, carefully, grey as smoke, the most dangerous thing he had ever done in a life that had lately been nothing but dangerous things.