I’m still on autopilot. All I want is to see the shape of the kid, see him turn and look at me with that serious face full of questions. Some days we don’t say a word, there’s so much quiet between us that I can’t speak.
I’m not a talker. Our pa always said that I was a doer and that Thomas did all the talking. But then Thomas up and went and left us scrambling through a whole mess even though we had everything we could need to make us happy for a hundred years to come.
Once, when we were kids, Thomas woke me up before there was any hint of dawn, he clapped a hand over my mouth and just whispered “Come!” and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I got out of my warm bed and pulled on my clothes fast to follow him as quiet as possible down a set of stairs we knew down to the last inch. We put our feet down in the right spots so a creak wouldn’t wake Pa up. We were like hunters on the lookout, we snuck out of the house, went past the other homes where folks were still asleep, all the way to the bit of forest that hadn’t been chopped down yet and around the lake to get as close as we could to the crevasses, that forbidden spot. Back when I was little, I thought the Earth had to stop flat to send birds flying off into the air, and I thought that was the perfect spot for birds to take off.
Thomas got on top of the last rock sticking out of the ground, puffed up his chest, put his arms out like he was the king of a world that would go on and on. He looked up and yelled like a warrior: “I’m Thomas, son of Magnus! Here’s my brother, Benedict, young but brave! Together we’ll win every battle!”
I was shivering, and my feet were hurting from all the pebbles poking through my slippers, but I looked at the only brother I had, who was so sure about our future that I didn’t worry one bit about it, and I pounded my chest with my little fist, yelled as loud as I could: “Every battle! Hear, hear!”
Right there and then I was sure no frontier could stop us, no obstacle could hold us back.
I’ve never woken up the boy in the wee hours. I’ve never taken him with me and told him that he’ll be the king of the world, the way his namesake did once. I don’t believe fairy-tale stuff like that, now that I know the sorts of things the real world’s got in store for us.