“We chased them off!”
Will and Sam come up, shattered glass crunching under them. Old Sam is red-faced and smiling ear to ear. He slaps his knees several times, laughing as he looks about him.
“Ooh-wee,” he wheezes to himself. “Look at all this, Myrtle. We fixed ’em good, didn’t we? Ooh-wee.”
He drops to one knee and lays a hand on one of the motorcycles. It’s hot to the touch, and he snaps his fingers back real quick.
“How much you figure Hank Wistar will give me for these parts?” Sam grins again and slaps his hands against the singeing metal.
I help Frankie to his feet and brush him off as Pete and Will lift one of the bikes upright. Pete swings a leg over it and sits with his hands on the bars. “How do I look?”
Dad stands with his hands on his hips. His blue eyes sweep over the road, the logs, the steaming motorcycles. He smiles.
He looks down and kicks at a piece of glass.
“Well,” he says, long and slow. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up.”
There is a kind of tired a boy can be when even breathing seems too much work. I feel that way as I lean against Stairways’ cool stone and let a heaviness like lead settle into my arms and legs.
A slow fire burns in my muscles, a deep, dull ache that is somehow so satisfying and so good. I borrow a breath from the summer night and let it out, long and slow.
We lifted those old oak logs in and out of our truck in three different places—at Madliner House, at Sam’s, and finally at Stairways. From the porch, I can see the logs stacked beside the barn, tall and dark, there to wait, there to dry in preparation for winter.
They will burn well.
My stomach tightens as I remember Mr. Madliner’s words. There was something uncomfortably gleeful in the way he said it, like he looked forward to a time of burning for the great old tree.
I push that man out of my mind and focus instead on the good pain in my shoulders and neck, the pain that comes from working with people I love and who love me.
I doze for a time, there against the solid stones of the house where I was born. Fireflies are glowing in the yard when I wake. I sniff and smell something that wasn’t there before: cigar smoke.
Dad is in the yard under the tree, watching night come to the valley he loves so much.
Gathering my last ounce of strength, I get to my feet and cross the yard toward him. As I go, I see a mistiness curling along the base of our hill, rising off Apple Creek, blanketing the tree roots. Soon, those long white fingers will drift across our yard.
“Dad?”
“Hm.”
“What’s a man’s dignity?”
I did not even know the question was in me.
“Why do you ask?”
“Today on the road, when Sam was so sad about his mailbox, he said, ‘A man’s got his dignity.’ I was just wondering what it means, is all.”
Dad nods and his cigar trails lines of silver into the blue-black bowl above us. The first stars are coming out.
“Dignity is your value, Jack. It’s something you and every living person have just because you are.”
“Is that all?” I ask.
“Isn’t that enough?”
I’m quiet.
“That’s plenty,” Dad tells me. “In fact, it’s everything. The dignity of others is how we know some actions are good and others bad. It’s how you know it isn’t right to steal, or to kill without grave reckoning, or to lie.”
“You get all that from dignity?”
“You do.”
Dad looks down at me, and it seems he’s standing very tall.
“Crash Callahan is dragging more than Myrtle’s mailbox through the dust. It’s Sam’s understanding of his own self-worth.”
“Oh.”
Above us a shooting star traces its way across the night sky.
“Can you lose your dignity?” I ask after it disappears on the other side of the world.
Dad puffs a long time on the cigar before he answers.
“I don’t think so,” he says slowly. “You might forget you have it, but you can never lose it.” The end of the cigar glows brightly. “How’s that?”
“That’s good.” I yawn.
At the base of our hill, the mist has thickened.
“Are you going to make it all the way up those stairs?” Dad asks.
I nod my head, but Dad knows what I want, and I don’t complain when he lifts me up in his arms and carries me across the yard to the house.
Chapter 11
BOBBY
A river of black tar oozes under a fiery sky. On the far bank, boys in uniform line up and wait patiently beneath dark trees.