Chapter 10 #2
Junior looked at him, and slowly, slowly, something in the boy's face eased. Not the fear, exactly. The aloneness. The deepest terror, the one under all the others, the one that had climbed into his voice, I don't have anybody, I'm all alone. That one eased.
"I'd still have Sofia," Junior said quietly. "And Maya. And Nathan would teach me the rifle like he said."
"You'd have all of them," Francis said. "Forever. That's a promise I can keep. That one's iron. You will never be alone again, whatever happens to me. Never."
Junior nodded slowly. And then he leaned into his father and put his arms around his neck and held on, and Francis held him back, out on the rise in the spring sun with the whole farm spread below them and the plain rolling away toward the danger.
They sat like that a long time.
Finally Junior spoke, muffled against Francis's shoulder.
"When do you leave."
"Not yet," Francis said. "A few more days. I wanted to tell you now so you'd have time. So it wouldn't be a shock the morning I go. So we'd have some days together first. Good days. To remember."
"Good days," Junior said. "To remember." He was quiet a moment. "In case."
"In case," Francis agreed softly, because he would not lie, not even here. "But mostly just because good days are good, and we should have some, whatever happens. Come on. Let's not spend the ones we've got being sad. Let's go do something. Anything you want. You name it."
Junior pulled back, and wiped his face one more time, and Francis watched his son do the thing that broke his heart and made him proudest all at once, the thing the boy had learned this terrible year.
He put the grief away. Folded it down. Chose, deliberately, to make the most of the time there was, because time was short now and everyone knew it.
"Can we fish," Junior said. "Nell said there's a creek. A real one. With fish maybe. Can we go fish, just us, before you leave?"
"Yeah," Francis said, and had to look away a second, out at the plain, before his own face gave him away. "Yeah, buddy. Let's go fish. Just us. Let's go find that creek."
They walked down off the rise together, the man and the boy, hand in hand, and Francis carried the thing he now knew, which was that leaving was going to be even harder than he'd feared, and also, strangely, a little easier, because he'd done it right.
He'd told the truth. He'd given his son the truth and the love and the rest of them to hold onto, exactly as Ruth had said.
And whatever happened out there on the grey miles ahead, his boy would carry three true things instead of one sweet lie. That it was dangerous. That his father would fight with everything he had to come home. And that, come what may, he would never, ever be alone.
That was the best a father could do now. Francis had done it.
And in three days, he would walk out the door and put it to the test.
They found the creek that afternoon.
Nell walked them to it, out past the south fence and down a long fold of ground, to where a thin thread of water ran clear over stones in a cottonwood draw.
It was small. But it was moving, and it was cold, and when Junior lay on his belly on the bank and looked into a still pool below a little rill, he saw them.
"Fish," he breathed. "Dad. There's actually fish. Real ones."
"Real ones," Francis said, crouching beside him. "Small. But real."
They weren't much. Little silver things, minnows near enough, darting in the shadows.
But to a boy who'd spent a winter eating preserved venison and cellar potatoes, they were a marvel, and Francis watched his son's face light up over a handful of creek minnows and thought that was worth more than a truckload of anything Stanley Macklemore could steal.
Nell showed Junior how to make a trap from a bent willow and a bit of net Ruger had produced from his endless coat.
She was patient with the boy, gentle in a way that surprised Francis, this hard girl off the ridge.
And Francis understood, watching, that Nell had probably had a younger sibling once, before the trucks came, and that teaching Junior to trap fish was Nell filling a hole in herself the same way planting seeds filled Ruth's.
The braid, tightening. Even here. Even at a creek.
They caught six of the little fish by evening. Not enough to feed anybody. But Junior carried them home in a jar like treasure, and Maya fried them up small and crispy, and the whole farm had a taste, one bite each near enough, and everyone made a fuss over Junior the fisherman, and the boy glowed.
Francis watched it all from the edge of the room. His son, glowing. His people, making a fuss. The warm crowded farmhouse, twenty souls, a fire in the stove, the smell of fish and woodsmoke.
This. This was the thing. This was what he was leaving to protect. He fixed it in his mind, every detail of it, to carry out onto the grey miles.
The face at the window, Ruth had said. Hold onto the face at the window. He'd hold onto this whole warm room.
The next two days he spent getting ready.
Not just packing, though he did that, careful and grey, the way he did everything. He spent the days handing off.
He walked Nathan through every piece of the farm's defense, though Nathan knew most of it, made him say it all back anyway, the watches, the blinds, the tripwires, the drill for when trucks came up the road, the cellar hide for the children.
He put Nathan in charge. Said it plain, in front of everyone, so there'd be no confusion.
While I'm gone, Nathan leads. What he says goes.
And Nathan took it soberly, the weight of it, and nodded, and Francis trusted him with it completely.
He sat with Ruth and went over the fields.
What to watch for. When to water, if the rain didn't come.
How to read the corn as it grew. Ruth knew ten times what he did about all of it, of course, but he wanted her to know he trusted her with the harvest, the actual harvest, the thing the whole war would turn on.
She was the keeper of it now. She understood.
He talked with Cole, quiet, aside. Told him he was counting on him.
Told him he'd seen the temper under the hardness and told him, gently, that the farm couldn't afford it while Francis was gone, that Cole had to hold himself steady, be Nathan's right hand, not go off half cocked.
And Cole had looked at him with those flat dark eyes and said, quiet, "I know what I am. I'll hold it. For the boy, if nothing else. I like the boy." And Francis believed him.
He spent time with Maya.
That was harder to do and harder to name.
Over the winter something had grown between them, careful and unspoken, an adult thing, two people who had bled beside each other and held each other's people alive.
Nothing said. Nothing acted on. Just a warmth, a steadiness, a way of looking to each other first.
They walked out to the windmill on the second evening, the two of them, and stood where Ruth liked to stand.
"You're really doing this," Maya said. "Walking out onto Combine ground. Alone. For weeks."
"I'm really doing it."
"You know it's insane. As your nurse, as the person who put your skull back together three weeks ago, I'm required to tell you it's insane. Your head's barely healed. You'll be alone, exhausted, exposed, and if you take one more knock to that skull out there, there's no coming back from it.
There's no me out there to catch you."
"I know," Francis said. "I'll be careful of it. Careful of everything. That's the whole plan. Grey and careful, every step."
Maya was quiet a moment, looking at the water.
"Come back," she said finally. Simple. Not dressed up.
"That's all. I don't have a speech. Ruth's got the speeches. I've just got the one thing. Come back. That boy needs you. And."
She stopped. Started again. "And you've built something here, Francis. All these people. Me included. We need you too. Not just Junior. All of us. So come back. To all of us."
Francis looked at her, at the steady hard face that had gone, just for a second, unsteady.
"I'll come back," he said. And then, because it was true, because he didn't lie: "I want to come back. To all of it. To all of you. That's new for me, wanting to come back to a whole lot of people. For a long time it was just Junior. Now it's."
He gestured at the farm, the lit windows, the warm crowded house.
"Now it's all of it. All of you. That's a thing worth coming home to. That's the thing that'll bring me home."
Maya nodded. And for a moment they stood close in the evening light, closer than they usually let themselves stand, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to close the last of the distance.
Neither of them did. It wasn't the time. There was a war coming and a father leaving and it wasn't the time, and they both knew it, and there was something in the not-doing that was its own kind of promise. A thing waiting. A thing to come back to.
"When you're out there," Maya said, stepping back, steady again.
"And it's dark, and you're alone, and it's hard. You think about the fact that there's a whole houseful of people here who are counting the days till you're back. That's a thing to hold onto. You're not a man alone anymore, Francis. You've got a home now, full of people,
and every one of us is waiting. Remember that when it's bad."
"I'll remember," Francis said.
The last evening, Francis sat by the fire with all of them, and it turned, without anyone planning it, into something like a send-off.
Ruger told stories. Old ones, from before, funny ones mostly, and the whole room laughed, even Cole, and Junior laughed the real laugh, the one that came before the joke was done, and Francis fixed that sound in his mind too.
Ruth pressed things on him. Practical things. A hard sausage she'd been saving. A handful of seeds, tied in cloth, "in case you find a place worth planting, or a person worth giving them to." Advice, quiet, about reading farms, about which kinds of people to trust and which to walk wide around.
Nathan checked his kit one more time, silent, thorough, the way you check a friend's gear before he goes somewhere you can't follow.