Chapter 10 #3
Nell gave him the most useful thing of all.
She sat with him and a scratched dirt map and drew him the plain from memory, every feature she'd learned from a winter on the ridge.
The roads the trucks used, so he could avoid them.
The high ground, so he could see without being seen.
The ridgelines, the folds, the dead farms, the way east toward the warehouse.
A whole map of Combine country, drawn by a girl who'd watched it for months.
"This is priceless," Francis told her. "Nell. This is the most valuable thing anybody's given me. This is what keeps me alive out there."
Nell looked at him, and something moved in her hard young face.
"Just use it," she said. "And come back. And then." She hesitated. "And then when you fight them. When it finally happens. Let me be there. Let me help. I've been planning how to hurt them for a whole winter, all alone, thinking I'd never get the chance. Let me be part of it. When it comes."
"You'll be part of it," Francis said. "You've already been more part of it than anybody. Half the plan is built on what's in your head. When the fall comes, you'll be there. I promise you that."
And Nell nodded, fierce and satisfied, a girl with a reason again.
And Ruger, last, drew Francis aside at the end of the night, and pressed something into his hand.
It was the little revolver. The Ruger SP101. The stainless snub-nose, in its soft black holster made for hiding, with a small pouch of the precious .357 rounds.
"You take her," Ruger said. "For real, now. Not just to look at. On your hip, tucked away, where nobody sees. Five in the wheel, seven in the pouch. For the one bad night the grey runs out."
His pale old eyes were steady. "I told you before. You don't thank a man for a gun by saying thank you. You thank him by comin' back to give it back. So come back and give her back, son. That's the whole deal. You bring my little gun home to me, with you attached to it, breathin'."
Francis took the revolver. Felt the weight of it. Twelve rounds. His whole war, if it came to the gun at all.
"I'll bring her back," he said. "And me with her. Thank you, Ruger. For this and for everything."
"Just come back," the old man said. "The rest is details."
They left him alone with Junior for the last part of the night.
Francis lay down beside his son in the dark, the way he did every night, and Junior curled against him, awake, not wanting to waste the last night sleeping.
"Tell me about Mom," Junior said, small in the dark. "Before you go. Tell me a Mom story. A good one."
And Francis, who carried Cheryl inside him the way Cheryl had promised the boy she'd stay in his heart, told him a good one.
From before. From when Junior was a baby, and Cheryl had walked him up and down the hall for hours when he wouldn't sleep, singing to him, and Francis had watched from the doorway, and it had been, for one moment, before everything went wrong between them, perfect.
A perfect thing. A mother and a baby and a father in the doorway, and love, simple love, the kind that came before all the hurt.
Junior listened, quiet, and Francis felt the boy relax against him as the story went, and by the end of it Junior was nearly asleep, and Francis kept his voice low and gentle and let his son drift off on the sound of it, on a good memory of his mother, on his father's steady voice in the dark.
"I love you, buddy," Francis whispered, when the boy was under. "More than anything. More than the whole world. That's the thing that's true when nothing else is. I love you, and I'm coming back to you, and you are never alone. Never."
Junior sighed in his sleep and burrowed closer, and Francis held him, and did not sleep himself, not much, because he did not want to waste the last hours of holding his son.
Morning came grey and cold and clear.
Francis was up before the light. He'd said most of his goodbyes the night before, deliberately, so the morning could be quick, because he'd learned that long goodbyes just drew out the pain and gave the fear more time to work.
He'd told them all: don't make a thing of it in the morning. Let me slip out grey. That's how I do everything now. Let me go the way I'll travel, quiet, unremarked, a nobody walking off into the dawn.
But they were up anyway. Of course they were. All of them, in the grey light, gathered at the door, and Francis understood that you could not tell people who loved you not to see you off, and that he wouldn't have really wanted them to listen.
He kept it short. A hand on Nathan's shoulder. A nod to Cole. A long look with Maya that said everything the two of them weren't saying. Ruth's cracked hands taking his for a moment, her pale eyes fierce. Come home. Ruger's tip of the hat. Nell's fierce nod.
And then Junior.
The boy stood in the door in the grey dawn, and he was trying so hard to be brave, trying so hard not to cry, his jaw set, his small fists clenched, and Francis knelt down in front of him one last time.
"Remember the three true things," Francis said quietly. "Say them for me."
Junior's voice shook, but he said them.
"It's dangerous," Junior said. "But you'll fight as hard as anybody ever fought to come home. And I'm never alone, because I've got all of them."
"That's right." Francis pulled him close, held him hard, memorized the feel of him, the smell of his hair, the way his small arms came around his neck.
"That's exactly right. All three. Hold onto all three. And I'll be back before the corn tassels. That's my plan. Back before the corn's tall. Watch it grow, buddy. Every day, watch it grow, and know that when it's tall, I'll be coming up that road. Okay?"
"Okay," Junior whispered. "Before the corn's tall."
"Before the corn's tall." Francis kissed the top of his son's head. "I love you. More than the whole world."
"I love you too, Dad."
And Francis stood, before he couldn't, before it broke him, and he shouldered the grey pack, and he checked, out of habit, the things that mattered.
Earl's folding knife in his pocket. The little hidden revolver tucked away where nobody would see it.
Nell's map. Ruth's seeds. Water. Food. The whole small kit of a grey man going out onto killing ground.
He pulled the hood of the grey sweatshirt up. The same grey. The color of dirt and concrete and old shadow. The color the eye reads as nothing.
He looked at all of them one last time, his people, his home, his son in the doorway with the new tooth and the brave clenched fists.
"I'll be back," Francis said. "Watch the corn."
And then he turned, and he walked down off the porch, and down the long dirt road in the grey dawn, and he became, step by step, the thing he'd taught himself to be across a whole dead city.
Grey. Nothing. A shape the eye slides off. A face you can't remember five minutes after it passes.
He did not look back. He wanted to, with everything in him, he wanted to turn and see his son one more time. But he didn't, because looking back would break him, and a grey man could not walk out onto Combine ground broken.
So he kept his eyes forward, and his pace steady, not fast and not slow, and he walked down the long road toward the dead highway and the wide plain beyond it, toward the frightened farms and the wolf's warehouse and the woman who drained men dry,
toward the whole long grey war that waited for him out there in the rising light.
Behind him, at the farmhouse door, his son watched him go until he was a small grey speck on the long road, and then smaller, and then gone into the morning haze where the road met the sky.
And then Junior turned, and looked out at the field where the first green was just breaking through the dark earth, the corn coming up, and he understood his father's promise in a way that would carry him through all the long weeks ahead.
Watch the corn.
When it's tall, he comes home.
And Junior Deckham, eight years old, wiped his face, and set his jaw, and went to watch the corn grow.