DOC MOO RAN THROUGH the camp, tearing through a miasma of smoke and dust out of which men reared with bloody ears and clenched teeth, holding bloodied parts of themselves.
“Musa!” he yelled, barely able to hear his own voice. A high whistle filled his skull, whining between his ears. “Musa!”
A riderless horse galloped out of the fog, walleyed with panic, the empty stirrups swinging wide. Moo was nearly to the edge of the camp when he tripped on a rock and went tumbling, tasting dirt in his mouth. He was scrambling to his feet when someone grabbed his arm.
“Musa!” He squeezed the boy to his chest, then thrust him out to arm’s length, making sure he was intact, unwounded. Then he squeezed him again, hard enough this time he could feel the young bones flexing beneath his arms.
Musa was pointing out something to his father. Doc Moo turned to look. The bomb had come down just at the edge of the clearing, in the trees. Their trunks were splayed outward from the crater, charred and smoking, the smoke seeming to boil up out of the earth. If the bomb had landed even two hundred yards deeper into the camp, they’d be surrounded by blasted bodies, shorn limbs strewn bloody through the grass.
Doc Moo took Musa’s hand and led him toward the nearest cover, the shade tree with the bodies laid out beneath it. The blast had blown back some of the blankets, revealing the waxen faces of the dead, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He knelt with Musa at the base of the tree, holding the boy’s upper arms. “Can you hear me?”
Musa nodded. “I covered my ears and opened my mouth,” he said, miming the actions.
Doc Moo wasn’t surprised. The boy must have read the procedure in one of his books or magazines—how to survive shellings and bombardments.
“Good,” he said, beginning to hear his own voice. “Good. Now I’ve got a mission for you, Musa. It’s very important. If the miners are successful, this fighting could reach all the way to Mingo County, all the way home. I need you to get your mother, your sisters, and Miss Beulah over to the Kentucky side of the Tug, out of harm’s way. These bombs could be the first of more to come. A real war. You’ll need to travel down the western side of Guyandotte River, away from the fighting, until you’re well south of Logan, then you can read the land from there. That’s the better part of thirty miles. Do you think you can handle that?”
“I don’t want to leave you, Papa.”
Doc Moo nodded. “And I’d rather have you here with me, Musa. A father should never have to send his son on such a mission, but these are extraordinary circumstances. You are a man of the Muhanna household now. Sometimes we have to do things for our families we’d rather not. My father, he used to say character requires us to place what is right over what is easy. That’s what we’re doing now.”
Musa looked at the smoking trees, the schoolhouse, the shattered sky—empty for now. Then back to his father. “What if they drop more bombs here, Papa?”
Doc Moo squeezed his son’s arms. “Then our family will be all the more fortunate you’re somewhere else.”
The boy nodded. Tears in his eyes, but he wasn’t crying. He had his possibles bag looped over one shoulder and his heavy leather belt held the sheath of his bowie knife, into whose hardwood handle he’d etched its nickname, TOOTHPICK. His belt buckle was cinched on the outside of an overlarge chambray shirt and he hadn’t even brought a pair of shoes. A family joke that his hard brown feet could tolerate broken glass and hot coals but not a soft pair of loafers.
He stared down at those feet, then looked up again. “What about the O’Donovans, our neighbors the far side of Panther Creek? Their daddy died with the influenza last year.”
“What about them?”
“Can I bring them with us?”
Doc Moo cocked his head. “Don’t they have a daughter about your age?”
The boy straightened. “What’s that got to do with it?”
So there was something else drawing the boy into the woods. “Nothing,” said Moo. “Yes, you can bring them, too.” He moved his hands from the boy’s arms to the back of his neck.
“Listen, Musa. I know I’m hard at times, cross. But know this, I cannot imagine any other son I would entrust with such a task. If something were to happen to me, I could not be more proud of you to carry the Muhanna name. I thank God for you every day.” Moo brought their foreheads together. “I love you, Ibni.”
My son.
“I love you, Papa.”