Chapter 9 #3
They stood at the windmill a while, the two of them, watching the water.
"There's a thing I have to say," Ruth said finally. "And you won't like it."
"Say it."
"If you go all the way east. If you get to that warehouse and you see Sarah."
Ruth's voice was careful now, and low. "You're going to be tempted. To do something about her. About Dale. About twenty years. I know you, Francis. You're a decent man under all the grey, and decent men see a chance to settle a wrong and they reach for it. Don't."
Her pale eyes fixed on him. "You are not going out there to avenge an old woman's heartbreak. You hear me? Sarah took Dale from me two decades ago and it is the oldest wound I've got and I have carried it across the whole end of the world, and I am telling you, do not, for one second,
risk your life or your boy's future to do anything about her for my sake. If she's useful, use her. If she's a way to hurt the Combine, take it. But you do not touch her for me. You do not spend a single grey step of caution on my grief. Your job out there is to see, and to come home to that boy.
Nothing else. Swear it."
Francis looked at the old woman, at the years of hurt in her face, at the way she was, even now, especially now, choosing his son over her own oldest wound.
"I swear it," he said. "I'm not going out there for revenge. Not yours, not mine, not anybody's. I'm going to see, and to raise the army, and to come home. If Sarah's a tool, I'll use her cold, the way I'd use anything. But I won't spend a thing on her that I can't spend on getting back to Junior.
You have my word."
"Good," Ruth said. And something eased in her. "Good."
They walked back toward the house together, slow, an old woman and a grey man, the morning warming around them.
"When," Ruth asked. "When do you go."
"Soon," Francis said. "Days. The field's planted. There's nothing more I can do here that the rest of you can't do better. The longer I wait, the greener that field gets, the closer the fall comes,
the less time I've got to find the army and scout the warehouse and plan the whole thing before the trucks roll up that road to collect."
He looked ahead at the farm. "I want to leave before the corn's knee high. I want to be back before it tassels. That's my window. Weeks out there. Alone. Grey."
"That's a long time to be a ghost."
"It's a long time," Francis agreed. "But I've done long before. I crossed a whole city as a ghost, grieving, half broken, with a kitchen knife. I can cross a plain as a ghost with everything Earl taught me and everything you and Nathan and Ruger have given me since. I know how to do this.
It's the one thing I know how to do better than anyone here."
Ruth stopped at the porch steps.
"There's a harder thing than the plain," she said. "You know it. I know it. The plain, the Combine, the warehouse, the being grey, all of it, that's the easy part, for a man like you."
"The boy," Francis said quietly.
"The boy." Ruth looked at him steady. "Leaving him. Telling him. That's the hard part. That's the part I don't envy you. Junior lost his mother two months ago on a concrete floor. And now his father's going to pick up and walk out onto the exact kind of ground where that happened, and he can't come,
and there's no promise you'll come back, and he's eight, and he's going to understand more of it than you want him to."
Her voice softened. "How are you going to tell him, Francis? How do you tell a boy who lost one parent to these people that you're walking straight toward them and might not come home?"
Francis was quiet a long moment.
Because it was the question that had been sitting under all of it. Under the fuel and the trucks and Sarah and the whole cold clean plan. The one part of it that had no clever answer, no grey trick, no thread to pull.
Junior.
"I don't know," Francis admitted. "That's the honest truth. I've planned the whole thing out, every piece of it, the route and the reading and the raising of the army and the scouting of the warehouse. And I haven't got the first idea how to look my son in the eye and tell him I'm leaving."
He looked down at his hands. "I've faced three men with a pipe. A warlord with fifteen guns. I took a shotgun stock to the skull and stood back up. And the thing I'm actually afraid of, the thing that scares me more than any of it, is a conversation with an eight-year-old."
Ruth put a hand on his arm.
"Then let me give you the only advice I've got," she said.
"The same thing your Earl would say, I'd bet. Don't lie to him. Whatever you do. Don't tell him you'll definitely be back, don't tell him it's not dangerous, don't dress it up soft. He'll know. Children always know when you're lying to make them feel better, and it doesn't make them feel better,
it makes them feel alone, because now they're scared and they can't even trust what you tell them about it."
Her old hand tightened on his arm. "Tell him the truth. The amount he can carry. That it's dangerous. That you're doing it to keep him and everybody safe. That you're going to do everything in your power to come home. And that whatever happens, he is loved, and he is not alone,
because there's twenty of us now who'd die for him. Give him the truth and give him the love and give him the rest of us to hold onto. That's all any of us can do for our children now. That's the whole of it."
Francis looked at the old woman, and thought of another old man, in a dark house, saying near enough the same words in a different voice. A man who lies about small things will lie about big ones. Don't you either.
"You really would have liked Earl," Francis said, rough.
"I like everybody who tells the truth," Ruth said.
"There's precious few of us left." She let go of his arm.
"Go tell your boy, Francis. Do it soon, and do it straight, and give him a few days with it before you leave, so it's not a shock the morning you walk out the door. That's the kindness. Time to get used to a hard thing. Don't steal that from him."
Francis nodded slowly.
He looked at the farmhouse. At the door. Somewhere behind it, his son was awake now, probably, eating breakfast with Sofia, doing chores, being, for the first time in months, something close to a child again.
And Francis was about to walk in and hand him a hard thing.
"I'll tell him today," Francis said. "You're right. He needs the time more than I need to put it off."
He squared his shoulders, the way he had at the top of the porch steps once before, facing a long road and unknown strangers.
"Wish me luck. This is the hardest thing I've done since the world ended, and I've done some hard things."
"It's not luck you need," Ruth said. "It's honesty and love, and you've got both. You'll do it right. And when you're out there, all those long grey miles, you hold onto how it goes today. You hold onto that boy's face. Because that's the thing that brings a man home. Not the plan. Not the gun.
The face at the window."
Her pale eyes held his. "I lost mine, Francis. My people. I know exactly what it's worth, having a face to come home to. Don't you ever forget for one grey step what yours is worth. It'll keep you alive when nothing else will."
And Francis Deckham climbed the porch steps of the home he had bled for, toward the son he was about to leave, and opened the door, and went in to do the hardest thing.