Chapter 15
Francis came home before the corn was tall.
Not tall the way he'd promised. Not yet.
But taller than when he'd left, waist high and green and reaching, and when he came up the long road in the grey dawn after days of walking west, he saw it from a mile off, the field green against the dead brown plain, exactly the beacon Ruth had warned it would be,
and his heart broke and lifted both at once.
Home.
They saw him coming. Of course they did.
The watch held even now, even after everything, and by the time Francis reached the last stretch of road they were coming out of the house, all of them, and Francis watched his people come out to meet him and counted them, the old reflex, and his heart clenched at the counting.
Because there were fewer.
Ruth was gone, he knew that, he'd watched it.
But there were others gone too, faces he didn't see, and he understood that the day the Combine came had cost more than Ruth, and that he'd been a hundred miles east while his people bled and buried their dead, and the guilt of it landed on him like a stone.
But then a small shape broke from the group and came running down the road, running full tilt, and everything else fell away.
"DAD!"
Junior hit him like a small freight train, the same as he had in a garage a lifetime ago, arms around his neck, face buried in his chest, and Francis went down to his knees in the road and held his son and held him and held him.
"You came back," Junior sobbed. "You came back, you came back, I watched the corn, I watched it every day like you said, and I thought, I thought when the Combine came and Ruth, I thought maybe you were, I thought—"
"I'm here," Francis said, his own face wet. "I'm here, buddy. I came back. I told you I'd fight to come home and I did. I'm here."
He held his son in the road in the dawn, and over the boy's shoulder he saw the rest of them coming, and he read the story in their faces before anyone said a word.
Maya, alive, thank God, alive, her face going soft and open and unsteady at the sight of him. Nathan, alive, a bandage on his arm, moving stiff. Cole, alive, hard-faced as ever. Nell, alive. Ruger, alive. Sofia, running now to Junior's side. Doreen.
But others gone. Two of Ruth's people that Francis didn't see, that he'd never see again, dead in the yard the day Macklemore came. And Ruth herself, the great absence, the hole in the middle of everything.
They gathered around him in the road, his people, his broken family, and there was joy in it, real joy, Francis alive and home, and there was grief in it, the dead they'd buried, and the two ran together the way they always did now, joy and grief braided so tight you couldn't pull them apart.
"We thought you were still east," Nathan said, gripping his shoulder, his voice rough. "We thought you didn't even know. About Ruth. About the day they came."
"I know," Francis said quietly. "I know about Ruth. I was there, Nathan. On the south ridge. I'd turned back, one day, to check the farm before I went east for good. And I was on the ridge when they came."
His voice caught. "I watched it. All of it. I watched Ruth. I couldn't reach her. I was a mile away and I couldn't reach her and I watched him."
The group went quiet.
"You watched," Nathan said slowly. "You saw her take three of them."
"I saw her take three of them," Francis said.
"Kneeling in her own blood with her hip shot out. Three of them, Nathan. And then I saw the gun go empty. And I saw what he did."
His jaw worked. "I saw all of it. And I couldn't do one single thing but watch. And then I turned east and I did what I went to do, because it was the only thing I could do that would ever make it mean anything."
Maya stepped close.
"You should have come down," she said, but there was no accusation in it, only ache. "We could have used you. It was so bad, Francis. It was so bad."
"If I'd come down I'd be dead in the yard with Ruth," Francis said gently.
"One man against thirty, across a mile of open ground. You know it's true. Earl's math. I couldn't save you by dying with you. So I lived, and I made the living count. And I'm going to show you how, all of you, because it counted, Maya. It counted for everything. I know how to beat him now.
I know how to end him. That's what I brought home."
He looked around at all of them, his people, in the dawn road, and he made himself say the last hard thing first, because they deserved it before anything else.
"But first," Francis said. "Dale."
"Who's Dale," Nathan said.
And Francis told them.
Standing in the road in the dawn, his son's hand in his, he told them about Dale Crotinger.
Ruth's man, from twenty years ago, from behind the wall she'd never let anyone climb.
The one who'd sold her the Glock and taught her to shoot it.
The one Sarah had taken. The one Francis had found alive, dug in at the edge of Combine country, an old gunfighter with a semi-automatic shotgun and hundreds of shells and a twenty-year grief.
He told them how Dale had come out of his bunker to raise the eastern farms with him. How Dale had known the warehouse, the fuel, the whole shape of the Combine. How Dale had understood Sarah better than anyone alive.
And he told them how Dale had died.
How the grey had run out one night, and a Combine patrol had found them, and Francis would have died in the open except that Dale had come, had heard the shot from miles off and come, and held off a truck and a dozen men with his Mossberg so Francis could run.
How Dale had gone down with his chest torn open and sent Francis running west and fired the last of his shells into the dark to buy the distance.
How the shotgun had fired, and fired, and then stopped, and not started again.
How Dale had made Francis swear to bring him to Ruth. To put him next to her, when the war was won and the dead were buried. Twenty years and a coward's shame all ended, together in the ground at last.
"So that's a thing I have to do," Francis said, his voice rough.
"When this is over. Whatever's left of Dale is out there in the east, in a fold of ground, and I swore I'd get him and bring him home and put him next to Ruth. And I will. I don't break promises to the dead. I've got too many of them counting on me."
The group was silent.
"Ruth never told us about any Dale," Nathan said finally, quiet. "Not one word."
"She kept him behind a wall," Francis said. "Same as I keep Cheryl behind mine, and you keep your brother behind yours. Everybody's got a wall. But he was real, and he loved her, and he died for us, for me, for her, and he's going to lie next to her when this is done. That's owed. That gets paid."
Maya reached out and touched his arm, and Francis saw in her face that she understood, all of it, the weight he was carrying home, Earl and Cheryl and Ruth and now Dale, the whole long list of the good ones who kept dying for him.
"Come inside," she said gently. "You've walked for days. You're grieving a man we never met. Let's get you fed and sat down, and then you tell us the rest. The plan. How we beat him. All of it."
She looked at him steady. "But first you rest, even an hour. Because I can see it on you, Francis. You've come home carrying more than any one man should. Let us carry some of it now. That's what a family's for."
And Francis, who had been alone with all of it for so long, out on the grey miles, carrying the dead by himself, looked around at his people, his living people, and let something in his chest come loose.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Okay. Let me see Ruth first. Take me to Ruth. And then I'll come inside, and I'll rest an hour, and then I'll tell you everything. Because we've got work to do. The hardest work yet. But first, let me see her."
They took him to Ruth's grave.
They'd buried her well. That was the first mercy. In the days after the Combine left, they'd buried their dead properly, and Ruth was under a good tree at the edge of the yard, near the fields she'd planted, with a stone at her head, and on the stone, scratched deep, one word.
RUTH.
And under it, Francis saw, they'd scratched something else, and it undid him.
TAUGHT US.
Because that was the truest thing about her, in the end.
The same way they'd marked Cheryl MOTHER, the truest thing.
Ruth had taught them. All of them. The soil and the seed and the other half of surviving, the together to Earl's alone.
She'd taught them, and she'd died with three of the enemy dead in front of her, and now she lay under a tree by the fields she'd made bloom.
Francis knelt at the grave.
"I'm home, Ruth," he said quietly. "I did what you'd have wanted. I didn't just grieve you. I made it count. I found the fuel. I found the way to end him. And I found Dale."
His voice caught on the name. "I found Dale, Ruth. He was alive. All this time, alive, out east, and he never stopped being sorry, and he came out of his bunker and he died for us, for you, and his last words were about you. He wanted me to tell you he was sorry. That you were right. About Sarah.
About everything. He said to put him next to you, at the end, so he could be sorry next to you forever."
Francis put his hand on the cold stone. "So I'm going to. When this is done. I'm going to bring him home and put him right here, next to you, and you'll have him back, the fool, twenty years late but back. That's a promise. That one's iron."
He knelt there a while longer, at the grave of the old woman who'd taught him the other half of everything, and then he stood, and wiped his face, and turned back to his people and his son and his home.
And the grief folded down, the way it had to now, and the cold clear machine took over, because there was a war to win.
"All right," Francis said. "Feed me, and let me sit an hour, and then everybody, everybody who can fight and plan, we talk. Because I know how to beat Stanley Macklemore. I've got the whole thing. And it's going to be the hardest, most dangerous thing we've ever done,