Chapter 9
SPARK
The chapel room door is thick enough that I can’t make out words, only the rise and fall of voices behind it.
I’ve been sitting on the bench across the hall for the better part of an hour, elbows on my knees, picking at a loose thread on my jeans until it’s twice as long as it started.
Junie brought me coffee I haven’t touched and sat with me for ten minutes without saying much, patted my knee once on her way back to the kitchen because somebody’s got to feed a hallway full of men who’ll be hungry the second this is over, no matter what they decide in there.
The kitchen behind her already smells like a holiday, three chickens roasting, two pans of cornbread, a pot of greens big enough to bathe in.
Whatever that table decides, this club will decide it fed.
There’s a plenty in this place I’m still not used to, after three weeks of thawing one casserole at a time in an empty house.
Once, a fist comes down hard enough on the table that I hear it. Nobody raises their voice after. That’s somehow worse.
The door opens sooner than I expect, and Cross leans out. “Spark. Table wants you a minute.”
I brace like I’m the one on trial, but I go in anyway.
The room’s big. A long table with Rancor at the head, Boulder at his right, Cross beside him. Brick’s down the far end, arms crossed. A dozen other faces closed off, in a way that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with what they’re about to decide.
“Farm’s got two ways in,” Rancor says, not a greeting, picking up wherever they left off. “That right?”
“The main lane off the county road, and a service track behind the equipment shed that comes out near the tree line. Most people don’t know the second one’s there. Wade kept it graded for the hay truck.”
“Boulder says anybody watching that back track could see somebody coming a half-mile off.”
“If they know to watch it. If they don’t, somebody could walk right up to the barn without ever touching the front gate.”
Rancor nods once, like that’s exactly the answer he needed, and looks to Boulder.
“That’s all,” Rancor says to me, not unkind. “Go on back out. We’ll be a minute more.”
I go. The door shuts behind me, and I sit back down on the bench and can’t make my knee stop bouncing. A few minutes later I hear Rancor’s voice rise just enough to carry through the wood, flat and final, like a gavel coming down, even though this club doesn’t use one.
Then chairs scraping. Then the door.
They come out loud after the quiet, noise flooding back into the hallway all at once.
Somebody laughs hard. Somebody else claps a hand on Cross’s shoulder.
It takes me a second to understand what I’m looking at.
Relief. They voted to go to war for a farm most of them have never set foot on, and it lands on them like relief.
Looks like for men like this, deciding is always better than waiting.
Boulder finds me before I can ask anybody what happened. He turns, half in the doorway, and, loud enough that every man still filing out hears it, he says, “One more thing. No one puts a hand on Spark. If you do, you’ll answer to me personally.”
Every man in the room goes quiet at once. Rancor doesn’t even raise his voice from the head of the table. “And whatever’s left when Boulder’s done answers to the rest of us.”
A couple of the older patches nod, like they already knew, like this was never really a question.
Brick pushes off the wall he’s been leaning on and clears his throat like the words cost him something to hand over.
“Put me on farm watch,” he says to Boulder, already turning to head off. “First rotation. I’ll take nights.”
Whiskey claps him on the back on his way past. Brick shrugs it off like it’s nothing, like he hadn’t volunteered for the worst shift, and disappears toward the kitchen without looking back at me once.
I remember him that first morning in the garage, the ugly grin, Boulder’s hand closing hard on his cut. I don’t know what to do with the two of him sitting side by side in my head.
Boulder walks me a few steps down the hall, out of the traffic, and gives me what the door kept from me. He lays it out plain, one piece at a time, like he’s reading an engine.
“Farm goes from loud to held as of today. Overnight watch, front lane and that back track you confirmed he kept clear, in addition to the daytime shows of presence. Nobody comes up either one again without us knowing.”
“But you won’t be able to keep that up forever,” I say.
“No. For now we’re buying room to end it right. The estate settles this week. Paperwork alone doesn’t stop men like that, but ownership will be, on record, public. Whatever lease game they played dies on a courthouse desk.”
“And the part paper can’t fix?”
“Cross keeps the log running.” We’re moving as he talks, an easy drift toward the main room, his shoulder steering mine at the corner. “We map every run Warden makes down that corridor until we can say what the fuck he’s moving and where it turns.”
“And then?”
“Then Spade.” He watches me take the name in. “We put what we know on his table and find out if the Hounds really want a war over one barn."
“And if he does?”
“Then we deal with it. The table voted on that too.” He doesn’t dress it up. “Either way, nobody touches you or that farm.”
Boulder finds my hand, his fingers closing loose around mine like it’s the easiest thing in the world, and leads me into the main room and its ordinary noise, somebody arguing over a pool game, a race running on the wall TV, Songbird’s laugh carrying over all of it.
I look around at all of it. A room full of men who decided, knowing me less than a handful of days that a farm I was about to lose is worth going to war for. Junie’s coffee still sitting where I left it on the bench.
This isn’t shelter anymore. Shelter is something you’re given and can lose.
This is starting to feel like something nobody gets to take away.