Chapter 10 - The Mountain Orchard
The Green Mountains in October are an ocean of fire.
The sugar maples turn a brilliant, blinding crimson; the paper birches drop carpets of pale gold across the granite ridges; and the morning frost stays white in the hollows until the sun clears the crest of Mount Mansfield at nine o'clock.
Our farmhouse sat two miles down an unpaved gravel road outside the village of Craftsbury, built of local fieldstone and hand-hewn hemlock beams that had stood since eighteen-forty.
There were no gates. There were no cameras. There were no armed marshals standing by the mailbox.
There was only the sound of the Black River tumbling over the limestone ledges at the bottom of the meadow, and the steady, rhythmic thunk-chunk of the wood splitter working beside the barn.
I stood on the back porch with a ceramic mug of black coffee between my hands, watching the morning mist rise off the orchard.
Sophie was running through the rows of Northern Spy apple trees.
She was eight years old now. She wore a pair of faded denim overalls over a thick red flannel shirt, her dark hair flying behind her in two wild, unbraided wings. Her face had filled out, the soft, round dimples returning to her right cheek, the pale line of the surgical scar along her left jaw now almost invisible beneath the light dusting of autumn freckles.
Beside her bounded two huge, shaggy livestock guardian dogs—Anatolian Shepherds we had adopted from a rescue in New Hampshire—their tails curled high over their backs, barking with deep, joyful, booming voices as they chased a flock of wild turkeys through the fallen leaves.
Sophie didn't look back to see if someone was watching her.
She didn't lower her head. She didn't swallow her voice.
She stopped beneath a heavy branch laden with dark-red winter apples, jumped twice, caught an apple by its stem, and pulled it free with a sharp, triumphant twist.
"Mama!" she shouted.
The voice was clear. It had a tiny, metallic rasp at the very top of the register—the ghost of the crushed mental nerve—but it carried across the hundred yards of open pasture with the bright, bell-like force of a brass trumpet.
"Mama, look! I got the big one!"
I set my coffee mug on the cedar railing, walked down the three fieldstone steps, and stepped out onto the wet grass.
The cold air filled my lungs—clean, sharp, tasting of wet spruce needles, woodsmoke, and mountain soil. There was no smell of copper here. No smell of stale bourbon. No smell of burnt phosphorus.
Sophie ran toward me, her boots thudding against the turf, the two dogs bounding at her heels like shaggy gray lions.
She hit my knees with the full, unchecked momentum of an eight-year-old girl who believed with every fiber of her small, stubborn heart that the earth was solid beneath her feet.
I caught her with both arms, lifting her off the ground, swinging her in a wide, dizzying circle against the backdrop of the blazing red maples and the deep blue sky.
She laughed.
It was not a quiet chuckle. It was a loud, unbridled, joyous shriek that echoed off the stone barn, bounced across the river, and scattered the crows from the tops of the hemlocks.
I brought her down against my hip, my forehead resting against her warm, sweet-smelling temple.
"Look at it, Mama," she said, holding the red apple three inches from my nose. "It’s perfect. It doesn't have a single worm."
"It's a beauty, Sophie," I whispered, my fingers gently brushing the soft skin of her jaw where the three titanium plates rested silent and immovable beneath the flesh.
She reached up with her free hand, her thumb and forefinger catching my chin, tilting my face down until her slate-gray eyes—the eyes that had once looked out from the ashes of the Ellison hearth—locked onto mine.
She didn't speak.
She didn't need to.
She leaned forward and pressed a warm, sticky kiss directly against the scar on my right cheek—the one I had earned fifteen years ago on a nameless hill in the Kunar Valley, back when I thought the only battles that mattered were the ones fought with artillery and maps.
Then she wiggled out of my arms, dropped back onto the grass, and took off running toward the barn, holding the apple high above her head like an Olympic torch.
"Come on, Barnaby!" she shouted to the lead dog. "First one to the woodpile gets the core!"
I stood in the center of the orchard, the morning sun finally clearing the birch ridge, bathing the meadow in a warm, golden wash of autumn light.
I reached into the pocket of my flannel jacket.
My fingers touched the small, smooth object that had lived there for eighteen months: the small black tracking transmitter Colonel Vance had given me on the night of the breach.
I pulled it out.
I walked twenty paces to the edge of the river bank, where the water swirled deep and black through a narrow chasm in the granite bedrock.
I opened my hand.
The black plastic cylinder fell three feet, struck the surface of the cold mountain water without a splash, and was instantly seized by the current, tumbling down through the gravel and the foam, carried south toward the sea where the ghosts of old men had long since turned to dust.
I turned my back to the water.
Up by the barn, Sophie was sitting on an overturned hemlock log, using her small pocket knife to peel a strip of red skin from her apple, her laughter rising once more into the clear, empty sky.
May you like
The mother walked up the hill to join her.
The operative stayed behind in the dark, where she belonged, with nothing left to guard but the silence.
