Daunting Days of Winter (35 page)

Four Deer Creek men had been buried. All were given hero’s farewells for their willingness to protect the community, no matter the cost, and Jennifer was emotionally and physically drained. She couldn’t remember a more difficult period in her life than the previous three and a half weeks. She had thought the first weeks after the EMP were tough, and they were, but now they seemed comparatively easy.

Kyle’s arrest, near execution, then banishment, the death of Madison’s mother, caring for the baby under tough conditions, the assault on the community, and the terror of losing her son as the gunfight raged within earshot – after all that, the funeral was almost a break. But even then, to see the grief of families who had lost husbands and fathers just added even more to her own emotional toll, and she felt like she was reaching her limit.

Thursday’s battle had been a complete nightmare. She’d waited inside during the confrontation, trying to focus on the baby, who still didn’t love goat milk but would eventually finish her bottles. Jennifer had tried the milk and didn’t love it either, but the Shipleys had assured her that it was fine, if not delicious, so she forced the milk, the baby’s best hope to stay alive, on Madison. When the shooting had started, it terrified her, knowing that not only was David in immediate danger, but the community as a whole was on the brink as well.

As the shooting had built to a crescendo, with hundreds if not thousands of shots fired, she was sure that there wouldn’t be any survivors, and thinking of David injured, bleeding, and alone, ripped her heart out. Sending your son off to war was one thing. Sending him to war and listening to him die was something altogether different. The fighting seemed to go on forever, and Carol, Grace, and Jennifer, along with the children, had knelt in a circle and prayed until the guns went silent.

As soon as the shooting was over, the women had rushed to the bridge, searching frantically for the injured and, more specifically for Jennifer, David. No one had known where he was when she got there, the regular militia units having been split up. She had headed across the bridge, having just passed Luther’s twisted body and fearing the worst, when Ty had called her over to where he sat with his wife, nervous tremors still wracking his body.

He’d just explained that David had been sent to Clinton for reinforcements when gunfire erupted out on the highway towards the East. Sean had quickly dispatched a squad to investigate, of which Jennifer insisted on being a part, and they hurried down the highway to find David and some men from Clinton carrying the bodies of two men in fatigues who had fled. Jennifer was so overcome with emotion when she saw David that she had to be helped back to town.

The rest of the day was spent recovering from the assault. Deer Creek had lost four men: Luther at the bridge, Anderson West at the East berm, and two men in the militia house, cut down by the machine gun when the walls of the house had proved to be inadequate protection against the heavy weapon.

None of the group that had attacked the town appeared to survive. A total of twenty-two bodies, all of them men ranging in ages from early twenties to late forties, had been buried in a mass grave on the north side of the river. Sean had reported at Friday’s militia meeting that more than two dozen weapons, forty-one thousand rounds of ammunition, a moderate amount of food, silver, gold, fuel, and an assortment of crowbars, sledge hammers and other tools had been recovered. There were no plates on the bus or dump truck, but a registration document in the bus indicated an Oregon origin.

None of the men had identification, at least beyond a variety of tattoos and scars, and Jennifer’s heart broke a little for the mothers and wives who would never know what happened to their loved ones, even though she was glad the men were dead.

She had just drifted off to sleep when a knock sounded at the front door. Jennifer sat up and looked out the window, rubbing her eyes. A man and a woman stood on the porch, with a pair of horses out by the street. She got up from the couch and opened the door as Emma came upstairs with Madison, who had just woken.

The man turned as she opened the door, and she recognized him from the community. “Hi, Tom. Can I help you?”

He smiled. “Hi Jennifer. This lady here, Rose, is looking for your husband. I told her he was gone, but she wanted to talk to you.”

Jennifer looked closely at the woman, but didn’t recognize her. “Hi,” she said. “You’re looking for Kyle?”

The woman smiled and nodded. Her face was weathered, but pretty, her teeth white and straight. She was tall and thin, with sandy blonde hair that spilled out from under a water-stained cowboy hat. “Yes. He’s a friend. I needed some help, so I came here.”

It was chilly out, and Jennifer could see that the woman was tired and cold, so she invited her in, then went to the kitchen and filled a cup with warm water. After sending Emma downstairs with the baby, she handed the cup to Rose, who had perched on the edge of the couch. “Here. We don’t have coffee or tea, but the water is safe and warm. Tom said your name was Rose?”

“Yes. Rose Duncan. You’re Jennifer, right?”

“I am. I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you at all. Should I know you?”

The woman shook her head. “No, we’ve never met, but I know a lot about you, though Kyle didn’t tell me you were expecting. I only knew about your older children.”

“The baby’s not mine,” Jennifer explained. “Her mother died, and I guess I’ve kind of adopted her. How do you know us so well?” She looked at Rose warily, not comfortable with her level of familiarity.

“I can’t believe he didn’t tell you about me. I helped him in Wyoming when we had a big snowstorm back in October. He stayed with me for several days, before the roads cleared and he got back on his way. You don’t know how glad I am to find out that he made it safely. I’ve worried about him for the past four months.”

Jennifer’s mind raced back over the details Kyle had told her about his journey home. She thought she knew about most things, but Rose Duncan’s name was unfamiliar.

“Maybe he didn’t tell you about me. I’m sure there were a thousand other things that happened along the way. It’s nice to meet the woman a man would walk two thousand miles for. You’re just like Kyle described.”

Jennifer let out a puff of air. “I’m so sorry. I feel like I’ve let you down. Do you have family in the area? You’ve come an awful long way. There must something else that brought you this direction.”

Rose shook her head. “No. Just Kyle.”

Jennifer’s mind was racing, trying to recall what Kyle had said about the storm. She thought back to the meeting where Kyle had spoken to the community and remembered someone asking about it. If she remembered correctly, Kyle had said that he’d been saved by an older woman, but…

“He showed up in my yard in the middle of that terrible blizzard. Would have frozen to death if my dog hadn’t alerted me…”

This woman wasn’t older, maybe a few years, but not what you think of when you say older. Why hadn’t Kyle said anything about Rose?

“He stayed for four days, so we really got to know each other. He told me all about your family. Then when my homestead was attacked and my dog killed, well, it sounds strange, but Kyle was the only person I could think of to go to, after what I had done for him and all the time we’d spent together. I know it sounds silly, but here I am.”

Jennifer felt herself go cold inside, like someone had pulled a plug in her heel and let all of the life in her just drain out. “So, you’re saying you spent four days with my husband, then decided to follow him halfway across the country?”

Rose nodded. “I guess so. It sounds kind of creepy when you say it that way, but I guess that’s what it boils down to.”

“Can you excuse me for a minute?”

Rose nodded, smiling politely. “Do you have a bathroom I can use? After so long on the road, it would be nice to use an actual bathroom again.”

Jennifer indicated down the hallway. “There’s a bucket of water in the bathtub; use that to flush.”

She hurried downstairs to where her kids were playing a game of Risk. “Emma, I’m going out for a minute; take care of the baby. David, you help her.”

“You okay, mom?” David asked as he rolled the dice. “You don’t look very good.”

“I’m fine.” Jennifer went back upstairs, grabbed her coat off of the arm of the couch, and let herself out. She walked, trancelike, down the street, her mind churning over her conversation with Rose. Why would a woman, she wondered, follow a man five hundred miles across two states, on horseback, under such trying circumstances? The question repeated itself over and over in her mind, and none of the answers she came up with were good.

She thought back to when she was a young girl, and her mother had learned about her father’s indiscretions and the things he did while he was on the road. At the time, she couldn’t understand why it was so devastating for her mom, why she cried alone in her bedroom at night, even weeks after the revelation.

At that age, when boys weren’t that important, she had just thought it was because her mother was too fragile to handle rejection or disappointment, and that her mother was too dependent on her father. But after she married Kyle, Jennifer knew what it meant to give yourself to someone else. It was more than just sharing a last name and an address. It was letting them into your heart. It was putting all your weaknesses and vulnerabilities on the table and trusting them to still love you. Marriage was not being able to see a future without your partner in it, knowing that someone loved you, in spite of your silly mess-ups or odd little personality quirks. It was being the only one that belonged in that particular place in their heart, forever, no matter what happened.

It wasn’t finding out that you were just there for when they needed something, at their convenience, to be used interchangeably with whoever else might come along. She had never fully understood what her mother had experienced, until now. The wound was bitter, and painful, and devastating.

Jennifer walked numbly along the top of riverbank, picking her way past the boulders that dotted the bank. The water was low this time of year, but it was cold and still deep enough to be dangerous. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. The day had left her feeling so hollow she wasn’t surprised there was nothing left.

She looked out across the water, swift, cold, and deadly, and she crawled down to the edge, dropping her head into her hands. “You’ve done it, God. I’ve wondered for the past five months where my breaking point would be. Thought maybe I was tough enough to deal with whatever you threw at me, but I was wrong. I’ve endured separation, indescribable fear, evil, more death than I ever hoped to see, losing my husband twice, nearly losing a son, and now you have to rip my heart out too?”

A sob escaped her lips, and she shuddered, losing her grip on the rock and sliding down to the ice at the water’s edge, her legs splashing in up to her knees. The water was icy cold, causing her to jerk involuntarily, but she left her legs in, the temperature rapidly making them more and more numb. “Do you even care about me? Do you even know I’m alive, or did you just wind up this world and step back to watch it all fall apart?”

The river was rocky near the shore, then the bottom fell away to a deeper section where David liked to come and fish, though he never caught many to speak of. She estimated the water to be at least five feet deep, maybe six, not necessarily deep enough to be deadly, but fully dressed and with the cold temperatures, it could be dangerous. She didn’t have her gun, it was still on the floor beside the couch, but at least this way, her death could look like an accident.

Ten, fifteen minutes tops, she thought, and she would have no more worries, no more disappointments, no more struggles, no more anything. It could all be over. How nice it would be to not go to bed with your stomach hurting from hunger, or have to worry about what tomorrow might bring. If there was a heaven, maybe she would still make it. God embodied love, and surely He would understand what she’d been through. If hell was where she ended up, how could that be any worse than this. In fact, maybe it would be better, since she wouldn’t be cold or hungry. And, if there was nothing at all, well then there would be no struggles, no heartbreak, none of the crap that life seemed so happy to jam down your throat every day.

She stood up and reached out to swirl her hand in the water. It gave her goose bumps up and down her arms and across her back. She looked out to the deeper water, wondering how cold it would feel and how long it would hurt and if drowning or hypothermia would take her first. She took a step forward. The water was deeper and came up to her thigh. She gasped as the cold gripped her legs and the current tugged at her. She paused and looked around, knowing someone from the militia might come by and see her at any moment. She began to cry, wanting so much for all the pain to go away, but scared to take another step forward.

Jennifer heard laughter off in the distance that reminded her of Spencer, her pure, loving, little ray of sunshine whose enthusiastic hugs at bedtime melted all the troubles of the world away. Then she thought of Emma, and how much Emma mimicked her mother in wanting to be grown up and in charge, but how much she still craved her mother’s love and approval. David flashed before her, with his broad shoulders, his courage, and the emotional rock he had been for her through so many challenges. How can I do this to them? She shook her head, trying to clear it, to think straight. What am I doing, she asked herself.

“I’m not done yet,” she gasped, her jaw tight from the cold. She moved back towards the bank, her legs numb and unsteady. She stepped in a hole in the rocks, sinking up to her waist in the water. Shrieking from the cold, she grabbed at the ice ledge lining the side of the river to steady herself, but her fingers slipped off, causing her to lose her balance. The current nudged her, and she teetered back and forth as she fought to regain some stability. As she felt her foot slipping deeper into the water, she lunged forward and grabbed ahold of a large, exposed root on the bank of the river, clasping it tightly with both hands.