Conn (Conn Sullivan #1)

Prologue

It was hot the day of the accident. Beneath the blistering sun, the boys finished their work early and ran down to the creek to jump in the water and have some fun.

Trouble was, being boys, they brought a hatchet.

There is something uniquely brutal about a hatchet. It lacks the grace of a knife and the utility of a full-sized ax. It’s short and stubby and very effective in its limited way, which is the way of destruction.

A hatchet is made only to chop. You can flip it around and smash things with the butt of the head, but then you’re not really using the hatchet. You’re using a makeshift hammer, which is a brutal machine in its own right, though clearly not so destructive as a hatchet.

The spirit of these notions rushed through Conn Sullivan’s head as he tossed the hatchet onto the rocky shore of the creek, but he didn’t hold onto these thoughts, let alone ponder them, until later, when it was too late for pondering, and he faced a tough decision with a different sort of tool.

At the moment, he and his brother forgot all about the hatchet and jumped into the swimming hole, which this year was up against a bend in the creek, where spring floods had washed out the bank beneath a big sycamore, hollowing out a cave under the towering tree and exposing its roots like so many tangled secrets of the world.

The boys dove in and whipped playfully through the water like otters.

They were good swimmers. They were tall for their age—eight and a half, almost to the day—and lean and packed with wiry muscle that made them good workers, fast runners, and the best scrappers of any boys for miles around.

They were handsome boys with straw-colored hair, bright blue eyes, and winning smiles. They laughed easily and never walked when they could run.

Finally, they were twins, the oldest children of Reverend Paddy Sullivan and his wife, Mrs. Anne Sullivan, from whom they had inherited their fair hair, blue eyes, and bright smiles, and who had also brought into this world three other children by this point, all girls, curious creatures that wore dresses and clung to their mother and peered from windows, more like kittens than kids, the brothers thought.

After swimming, the boys got busy seeing what they would catch. They would dig their fingers under a big rock, preferably a nice flat one that wasn’t sunk too deep in the creek bed, lift one edge, and tilt it back.

One of them would hold the stone, and the other would plunge a hand into the roiled-up cloud of muck underneath, grabbing blindly where the rock met the stream bed.

They caught all kinds of stuff this way. Mostly minnows and crawdads.

Crawdads often latched onto a finger or, if the boys were really unlucky, the thin webbing between their fingers. When this happened, the victim would howl with agony, but it was mostly for show and fun. Sure, it hurt. But the Sullivan boys were tough as nails.

The previous summer, they’d dammed up the creek, dug a trench, and cleared out a shallow circular area they called the prison.

Everything they caught went into the prison, even in the spring, when they waded the flat rock, one of them waiting with a homemade net while the other pushed suckers toward him like he was driving deer to a hunter.

They caught some big old suckers, some of them as long as their arms and as thick as their legs.

All of them, large and small, went into the prison.

But then, overnight, they would disappear.

Vanishing frogs didn’t surprise them, of course. Frogs were free to hop away.

They figured crawdads were crawling over the rocks back to the main creek and thought maybe they were led by some innate knowledge given to them by God, the way Pa described the migration of birds and butterflies.

Pa saw God’s hand in everything.

So did Cole.

“We are wonderfully and fearfully made,” Pa would say and hold out his hand, examining it as if it was the first time he’d ever seen it. “God made us in His own image, boys, so it’s up to us to make the most of our gifts and seek a right relationship with our holy creator.”

And Cole would nod, taking it all to heart.

For his part, Conn didn’t doubt his father. Not really. He just didn’t get excited over the Bible like his brother did. They were both good boys with a wild streak. Cole was just a little better, and Conn was just a little wilder.

Cole looked on the bright side of things. Conn tried to look at things exactly as they were.

To Cole, the canteen was half full. To Conn, it wasn’t half full or half empty; it was exactly twice as large as it needed to be.

Despite these differences—and perhaps, Conn thought at times, because of them—they remained thick as thieves, not just brothers, not just twin brothers, but also best friends to the end.

Eventually, when they brought up the case of the disappearing prisoners to their father, he had a good laugh. “You boys have been feeding the raccoons.”

And sure enough, the next day, when they hurried down to the creek and found the prison once again empty of its inmates, they crouched down and discovered the tracks of the raccoons that had been raiding their holding tank night after night.

This year, they’d skipped the prison.

They had a new obsession. They piled up rocks and put a flat one on top, then placed smaller rocks around the perimeter, creating a makeshift wall.

They would each catch a crawdad and pit them atop this rock, which they called the arena. Sometimes, you had to encourage the crawdads to fight, but it was good fun once they got going.

Today, they only pitted a few crawdads before losing interest because Cole remembered the hatchet.

“Let’s practice throwing it,” he said.

They’d both heard about Indians throwing tomahawks and figured any self-respecting boy should be able to do the same thing.

They lined up in front of an old dead tree that had snapped off years ago. It was a thick, dead stump twice as tall as them. The rest of it had washed away in a spring flood before they were even born.

“Who goes first?” Cole asked.

“Me,” Conn said. “I’m older.”

Cole rolled his eyes and laughed and handed the hatchet to his brother. Their difference in age—fourteen minutes—was an old joke between them.

It was ironic, really, that Conn was the older of the pair. Even at eight years of age, he understood that irony.

Because his brother wasn’t just better behaved. He was more responsible, too, more mature, and more patient.

Cole generally did the right thing whether he wanted to or not. At least most of the time. Though he wasn’t above blackening the eyes of neighbor kids, putting a frog in his sisters’ bed, or fooling around like they were today, throwing the hatchet at the old tree.

Conn went first. The hatchet whirled through the air, winking in the bright sunlight, and stuck in the stump with a satisfying thunk.

Cole pulled it free and tried to replicate his brother’s feat. The hatchet struck the trunk at a bad angle, clanged loudly, and fell into the weeds.

This happened over and over and over.

Conn laughed at his brother’s repeated failures. “Let me have another turn.”

Cole handed him the hatchet.

Conn tried again and sunk the blade on the first try.

Cole frowned but didn’t give up. He was no quitter. “Let me get closer,” Cole said. “I just gotta get the feel for it.”

He stepped up close to the stump, hauled his arm back, and threw the hatchet with all his might. It hit wrong again, clanged loudly, and went spinning away.

This time, however, much to Conn’s horror, the hatchet struck his twin brother in the face.

It’s funny how, when something bad happens, time can slow down.

It was a thing Conn had noticed over the years, even at that tender age, and something he saw many times over the years that followed, how, when something dangerous happened, the whole world slowed down, letting you see and even think about things as they unfolded.

It was something he noticed in saloon brawls and especially during gunfights, these experiences coming to him years later, when he’d ridden off alone to see the world.

This day, he watched the hatchet spin, strike, and fly away, and even while the thing was still flashing through the air, he saw its path and knew it would strike Cole in the face.

He started to shout, but that’s another funny thing about those moments when the world slows down. Our eyes and minds might move at high speed, but our bodies remain slow.

At least until we train them. And at eight, Conn had not yet learned to control his body in that way.

All he could do was stand and watch that brutal chopping tool slam into his brother’s face.

Then Cole was down, and there was blood everywhere.

Conn had seen the cutting edge strike his brother’s face, so the blood was no surprise. He just didn’t know how bad it was.

When Cole started screaming, it was a relief, because for a second there, he figured his brother was maybe dead.

Cole sat up, gripping the side of his face in his tiny hands. Blood was running through the fingers.

Conn picked his own shirt off the ground and pried his brother’s fingers away before pressing the shirt into the wound, which was gaping and terrible, having laid Cole wide open from one high cheekbone almost all the way to his jawline.

“Hold that shirt against it,” Conn said, and scooped his crying brother into his arms and went running through the trees and across the fields, calling for their parents.

Later, their parents remarked with something like awe that Conn carried his brother without stopping, sprinting the whole, long way, never breaking stride.

To them, this seemed a feat of supernatural strength and endurance. But it was actually sheer determination. What they didn’t understand was that Conn would have sprinted ten miles to save his brother. But of course, he was only eight, so they were still getting to know him.

His reaction to Cole’s injury was one early sign of the type of man Conn would become and the faintest suggestion of the wells of willpower and compassion that resided deep within him even then.

But again, this was casual kindness. Thoughtless, really. His brother was hurt, maybe dying, so he’d carried him home.

It was not until later that night, when they knew Cole would survive and the wounded boy was weeping out of self-pity, that Conn showed the true depth of his kindness.

Cole had latched onto the thought of the terrible scar the accident would leave. “I’m gonna look like a bad man,” he sobbed.

Conn tried to calm him down and talk sense into him. When words failed and he could no longer bear his brother’s suffering, he did what he had to do.

His parents were shocked and furious.

They didn’t understand him.

That was fine, even with the pain and punishment.

Because Cole understood.

Brothers have to stick together, no matter what happens.

That goes double for twins.