Chapter 10 - THE UNENCUMBERED GROUND
The timber on the Goochland ridge was eighty feet tall, straight as rifle barrels, their grey-brown bark smelling of turpentine and warm resin in the late October chill.
Miles and I sat on the porch of the log cabin that had belonged to his grandfather—the one Reid Archer had tried to burn down in eighty-two.
The porch had new white-oak floorboards, cut from our own mill three miles down the creek, nailed down with five-inch iron spikes that Miles had forged himself in the shop behind the barn.
Jonah was sitting in a wooden rocker near the pump, holding a heavy cardboard mailing tube that had arrived from the clerk of the district court that morning.
“It’s over, Morrison,” Jonah said, not looking up from the brass cap of the tube. “Reid signed the final plea agreement at Butner yesterday. Three years probation, five million in restitution to the Department of the Navy, and the surrender of his law license in the Commonwealth.”
“And Helena?” I asked.
“She’s working for an insurance adjuster in Fairfax,” Jonah said, a small, quiet smile touching the corner of his thin mouth. “Processing accident claims for state fleet vehicles. She gets thirty-two thousand a year and an office with a window that looks out at the loading dock of a Sears. She told the notary that she was considering an administrative career in the civil service.”
Miles came out through the screen door, carrying three tin cups of black coffee that smelled of woodsmoke and chicory. He handed one to Jonah, one to me, and sat down on the edge of the porch, his heavy boots resting on the red clay of the yard.
“The crew from the mill’s coming on Monday,” Miles said, looking out over the valley where the James River was a grey, winding ribbon through the yellowing poplars. “We’re clearing the south forty for the sheep. Uncle Jonah’s got thirty head of Katahdins coming down from Pennsylvania on a cattle truck.”
“I’m an academic, Miles,” Jonah protested mildly, though he had already spent two hundred dollars on books about rotational grazing and parasite management in small ruminants. “I don't know the first thing about sheep.”
“They don't read books, Jonah,” Miles said with a short, quiet laugh. “You give them grass, you keep the coyotes off them, and they don't file for an injunction when the weather turns cold.”
I looked down at my hands.
The skin across my knuckles was rough now, scarred from four years of jump harnesses, motor pool grease, and the heavy iron tools of the Goochland shop. The white cotton wedding dress from Fayetteville was packed away in an ammo box under the bed, next to Grandfather Harrison’s journals and Miles’s bronze star.
My phone, resting on the cedar table beside my chair, didn't buzz.
It hadn't vibrated in six weeks.
The number had been changed, the old SIM card crushed under the heel of Miles’s work boot and buried three feet deep in the drainage ditch behind the Honeycutt gate.
Across the valley, a single red-tailed hawk was circling on a thermal, lazy and slow, its wings catching the late afternoon light as it dipped below the rim of the Blue Ridge.
There were no marble rotundas here.
No fifty-four-pearl necklaces coiled in velvet boxes like dead snakes.
No cold lobster bisque swallowed in silence while an old man with pale eyes checked the ledger to see how much your soul had cost him on the secondary market.
Just the wind coming through the eighty-foot oaks, smelling of leaf mold, clean cold creek water, and the hickory smoke from our own stone chimney rising straight up into an unencumbered sky.
Miles reached over, his rough, calloused fingers closing over mine. His grip was warm, heavy, and immovable.
“Ready to jump, Sergeant?” he asked softly, using Whitaker’s old line.
May you like
I looked at the pines, then at the man who had brought three lard cans of truth to a knife fight in the Capitol, and then down at the red dirt that belonged to us, free and clear, without a lien, without a mortgage, and without an Archer’s name on the deed.
“I’m already down, Miles,” I told him, squeezing his hand until our knuckles went white together. “I’m already down, and the ground’s solid.”