Cold fire ignites in my veins. I keep silent.
“It means your daddy should have sold to me when he had the chance. Now it’s over for him and your family. Or it will be, soon as the council votes.”
Kemper tugs at his suit jacket, then leans over from the waist. He looks directly into my eyes.
“How would you like living in a trailer? A little box on cinder blocks down by the tracks? That’d be quite a change from all this space, wouldn’t it?” He looks to the yard, to Apple Creek and the meadow beyond. “Because that’s about all your daddy will be able to afford if he holds out any longer on selling.”
I feel the tears welling up at the corners of my eyes.
“Maybe you ought to tell your old man to stop thinking only about himself,” Kemper says. A bead of sweat streaks down the side of his head, glistening in the sun. He dabs at it with a perfectly clean white handkerchief.
I swallow. Then, in a voice that’s hardly more than a whisper, I tell him, “You’re a small man, Mr. Kemper. You’ve got no guts. You leave that letter here if you want, and I’ll give it to my father. But you won’t get one inch of our land.”
Amazement flashes across his face. Then anger. The monstrously huge Adam’s apple does a dance along his pencil-thin neck, and he draws up and snorts. Then he tosses the envelope on the porch boards and turns back for the police car without saying anything. The officer lowers himself back in, and soon their wheels are making dust down our lane.
I sit a long time in my chair, Grandma Elliot’s quilt wrapped around me and that white envelope lying on the floorboards just a foot away from me. I don’t touch it. I won’t touch it.
It seems like I’m fighting too many battles, and not one I can win. Fevers, floods, and failed fighter jet expeditions; now a nasty man from the county hell-bent on taking our home.
Most of all, it seems like I’m fighting time. Pete turns eighteen next week. I know there’ll be another letter in the mail soon after that, one from Uncle Sam addressed to “Mr. Peter Elliot.” That letter will change his life—and all our lives—forever.
And there’s nothing I can do about that neither.
Chapter 18
THE WAR COUNCIL
When I show my family Kemper’s letter, everybody has something different to say. Will explodes with nasty names for him. Dad takes the letter and reads it over and over again, not saying anything, just reading. But it’s Ma who finally tells us what it is we’re going to do.
“Everyone kneel down right now and pray.”
And we do, right there in our kitchen: Ma and Dad, Pete, Will, Frankie, and me.
Closing her eyes, Ma leads us. “Dear Lord, if it’s in your plan, help us find a way to keep our home.” She draws a deep breath. “Teach us to fight.”
We all say amen and stand up. But then Ma surprises us all again.
“We are going to call a meeting,” she says.
“Of who?” Pete asks.
“Of everyone in this valley who might be affected by what’s in this letter,” Ma says, holding it up. “All the neighbors still left. And anybody who wants to help.”
“Even the Madliners?” I ask.
“Everyone, John Thomas,” says Ma. “There’s strength in numbers, and many minds are better than a few.”
Ma holds that letter tight. Her face is like stone. My mother is going to war.
Dad goes to her, kisses her on the head.
Suddenly I feel better than I have felt in ages. Looking about the room, I see the fire’s spread to each of us.
“When we having this meeting?” Will asks.
“Tonight,” Ma says. “With as many as will come.”
From my bedroom window, Frankie and me watch them come.
Sam is first. He arrives on foot, swinging the .22 over his shoulder. Butch runs to greet him as he lumbers up the lane, and Sam passes him something from the pocket of his overalls.
Next is a farm family from a few miles east of us, the Glattfelders. Most other families have sold out. Not them. Their boys are older than us, and one was drafted to Vietnam last autumn. Still in his work boots, Mr. Glattfelder has come straight from his fields.
Dad comes off the porch to greet both, taking their hands in his, looking them in the eyes, and thanking them for coming. He’s still doing that when a long black Cadillac grumbles up our lane. The men watch as the shiny black automobile purrs its way up to our barn. For one awful moment, I think it’s Kemper, that he’s somehow found out about our meeting and has come to put a stop to it. But then an old wiry man rises from the sleek metal, dressed in a linen suit. Puffs of cottony white hair ring his head like clouds, and he carries a long cane with a handle of whittled deer bone. He is just about the exact opposite of Mr. Glattfelder.