Even this.
And the moment he thought it, a bullet ripped through his back. The shot was already echoing down the mountain as he began to fall. He had a moment of overwhelming despair, and then everything began happening in slow motion.
The gray squirrel leaping from one tree to another seemed suspended in midair. The flock of birds taking flight from the sound of the gunshot moved like a kite just catching the wind. The flash of sunlight was a laser beam as it came through the forest canopy into his eyes.
And then he was down and his line of sight was the forest floor. Something sharp was poking the side of his face. Breath caught in a sob as a rush of blood flooded his mouth.
Oh God.
He gave in to the inevitable as the pain began to fade. His vision was beginning to blur. He blinked, and as he did, a tiny striped beetle with crab-like pincers came into focus. He watched it crawling on top of a pile of leaves and then saw the tail of a black snake as it slithered away.
A dog howled from somewhere nearby, and another answered, and then another, and he heard the footsteps again. But this time they were running away.
He could no longer feel his legs. He didn’t have enough air in his lungs to call for help. With the last of his life quickly fading, he pushed away the leaves from beneath his outstretched hand and scratched a name into the dirt.
* * *
Leigh Youngblood was in the garden behind her house hoeing weeds from the long rows of green beans. It was a repetitious job that required no thought, so she let her mind wander as she worked, thinking of the life she and Stanton had carved out for themselves on this West Virginia mountain.
Never once had she regretted giving up her family’s wealth and prestige to marry Stanton. The Wayne family from which she’d come held sway over most of Eden, the city in the valley below. Her family’s rage and disdain for what she’d done back then had known no bounds. They’d threatened Stanton’s life. They’d laughed and jeered at her, saying how far she would fall and how the two of them would fail. But loving Stanton was beyond her control. He was the beginning and the end of her world, and so she’d walked out of the good life and into his arms. Thirty-five years later they were still on the mountain, loving and thriving, and still proving all of them wrong.
Of their five sons, Samuel, Michael and Aidan were married and living close by. They had one grandson and another grandchild on the way.
Bowie was their oldest, but after the love of his life turned him down when he was younger, he’d left the mountains for the oil fields, mostly working on offshore rigs down south. He came home for Christmas every year but had never put down roots anywhere else.
Jesse was their youngest. He’d gone to war with plans of making the military his career, only to be sent home from what the war had done to him. Brain-damaged beyond repair, he would live out his life with the mind of a ten-year-old boy.
Leigh loved and supported them all, accepting their rights to strike out on their own as they saw fit, just as she had done.
She paused long enough to pull up a clump of grass from beneath the beans, and as she did, a tendril of her hair slipped free from the band holding it out of her eyes and proceeded to dangle in front of her face. She pushed it back as she tossed the grass clump out of the garden, then stopped to wipe away a bead of sweat. She was about to reach for the next clump of grass when she heard the crack of a gunshot, and then the echo as it bounced from peak to peak off the surrounding mountains.
Startled, she spun toward the sound just as a flock of birds took to the sky. Noting the direction, she thought of Stanton. He would be taking that route home, but he hadn’t taken his rifle. He’d only gone to visit his sister, who lived down near the lake.
Then she heard a dog howl, followed by another and another, and for a second she was so scared that her heart actually stopped. She didn’t know what had just happened, but something told her it wasn’t good. She dropped the hoe in the dirt and started walking toward the front yard.
Her son Jesse was sitting in a rocker on the porch, staring off into the trees.
“The war’s a-comin’,” he said, as she walked past him.
“Stay here,” she said, and when he started to get up and follow her, she turned and screamed, “Stay here! Get in your chair and don’t move until I get back. Do you understand?”
He was startled and a little upset that she’d yelled, but he minded her instantly and sat back in the chair.
“Stayin’ here,” he said, and started rocking.
Leigh was so scared she was shaking. She was afraid to leave Jesse and afraid not to go. She looked back at the forest, willing Stanton to come walking out into the sunlight with a logical explanation for what she’d heard.
When his face suddenly flashed before her eyes, her heart dropped. Stanton must be in danger. She started running into the trees, leaving home behind for whatever awaited her below. She set her path in the direction of where she’d seen the birds take flight and wouldn’t let fear lead her astray. She was a woman known for keeping a cool head and today would be no different, but she ran without thought for her own welfare, ignoring the brambles that caught in her skin or on her clothes, stumbling more than once on her downhill race to find the man who was her world.
All she needed to know was that he was okay, but she wasted no breath calling out his name. If the gunshot she’d heard had been a poacher’s bullet, she didn’t want to stumble into something and make it worse, and so she ran, ignoring the bramble vine that ripped the band from her hair. She ran without caution, falling more than once on her hands and knees, and once flat on her belly, causing her to lose her breath. She didn’t know she was crying until she felt the tears roll across her lips.
It was the sunlight coming through the canopy onto the back of Stanton’s red plaid shirt that she saw first. She stopped in midflight and screamed his name.
“Stanton! Stanton!”
Any second she expected he would lift his head and tell her it was just a broken leg or that he’d simply taken a fall. But when she was only a few feet from where he was lying, she stopped as if someone had shoved a hand against the middle of her chest.
He was dead.
She knew that from the bullet hole in the back of his shirt and the amount of blood on the ground beneath him. She fell to her knees from the shock, and then, when she couldn’t get up, began crawling toward him. The lack of a pulse was confirmation of what she already knew, and still she ran her fingers through his hair, through the long tangled strands, sobbing as the tendrils curled around her fingers. Tears continued to roll as she rocked back on her heels, searching the surrounding trees for signs of a poacher, and yelled out, “Are you still here, you bastard? Are you too scared to come out and admit what you’ve done?”
Then she noticed the odd crook of Stanton’s right arm and traced the length of it to the finger pointing at the word he’d scratched into the dirt.
Sound faded. Thought ceased.
A thousand images of the past thirty-plus years with him flashed through her mind, followed by shock and then disbelief.
“No! No, no, no, they didn’t! They wouldn’t! Why? Why now?”
All of a sudden she was on her feet, her heart pounding in growing rage. Then she threw back her head and screamed. Once she began, she couldn’t stop. One scream rolled into another, making it hard to breathe.
Nearby, dogs heard her, heard the devastation in her screams, and started howling. Then other dogs—dogs farther up the mountain and dogs farther down—heard and followed suit, until they were all howling in concert, understanding with their animal senses what humans had yet to discern.
Death had come to the mountain.
* * *
Samuel