"She had a lot of friends while she was at Oberlin," Ross added suddenly, glancing around at their faces as if to confirm that what he was saying was true. He looked at Gran. "This roast is delicious, Mrs. Freemark. I haven't tasted anything this good in a long time. I'm very grateful you included me."
"Well," Gran said, her sharp face softening slightly.
"She did have a lot of friends," Old Bob declared. "Caitlin had a lot of friends, all through school. She had a good heart. People saw that in her."
"Did you know my father?" Nest asked suddenly.
The table went silent. Nest knew at once that she had asked something she should not have. Gran was glaring at her. Her grandfather was staring at his plate, absorbed in his food. John Ross took a drink of his water and set the glass carefully back in place on the table.
"No," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, but I never met him."
The dinner conversation resumed after a few moments and continued throughout in fits and starts, with Nest's grandfather asking questions of John Ross, Ross offering brief replies, and Gran sitting angry and still throughout. Nest finished her meal, asked to be excused, and left almost before permission was given. She walked out onto the porch and down the steps to the backyard. Mr. Scratch was sprawled on the lawn sleeping and Miss Minx was watching him with studied suspicion. Nest moved to the rope swing, seated herself in its weathered old tire, and rocked gently in the evening heat. She felt embarrassed and frustrated by her grandparents' reaction to her question and wondered anew why no one ever wanted to say anything about her father. It was more than the fact that he got her mother pregnant and never married her. That was no big deal; that happened all the time. It was more than the fact that he disappeared afterward, too. Lots of kids grew up in one-parent households. Or with their grandparents, like she was doing. No, it was something more, and she wasn't even sure that it was something anyone could actually explain. It was more like something they suspected, but could not put words to. It was like something that was possible, but they were refusing to look too closely at it for fear that it might be so.
A few minutes later John Ross came out the back door leaning on his cane, carefully negotiated the worn steps, and limped over to where she twisted and bobbed in the swing. Nest steadied herself as he came up, grounding her feet so that she could watch him.
"I guess that question about your father touched a sore spot," he said, his smile faint and pained, his eyes squinting as he looked off toward the approaching sunset. The sky to the west was colored bright red and laced with low-hanging clouds that scraped across the trees of the park.
Nest nodded without replying.
"I was wondering if you would walk me to your mother's grave," Ross continued, still looking west. "Your grandfather said it would be all right for you to do so. Your grandmother gave him one of those looks, but then she agreed, too." He turned back to her, his brow furrowed. "Maybe I'm misreading her, but I have the uncomfortable feeling she thinks she's giving me just enough rope to hang myself."
Nest smiled in response, thinking of Wraith.
Ross ran his hand slowly down the length of his staff. "To tell you the truth, I don't think your grandmother trusts me. She's a very careful woman where you are concerned."
Nest supposed that was so. Gran was fierce about her sometimes, so consumed with watching out for her that Nest would find herself wondering if there was a danger to her that she did not realize.
"So, would that be all right with you?" Ross pressed. "Would you be willing to walk me over to the cemetery?"
Nest nodded, climbed out of the swing, and pointed to the gap in the hedgerow. She led the way wordlessly, setting a slow pace so that he could follow, glancing back to make certain he was able to keep up. In point of fact, he seemed stronger and more agile than she had expected. She wondered what had happened to his leg, if there was a way she could ask him without being rude.
They crossed the yard, pushed through the gap in the hedgerow, and entered the park. The evening ball games were already under way, the diamonds all in use, the benches and grassy areas behind the backstops crowded with families and fans. She led Ross down the service road behind the nearest backstop to the crossing gate at the park entrance, then along the roadway toward the burial mounds and the cliffs. Neither of them spoke. The day's heat hung thick and heavy in the evening air, and there was little indication that the temperature would change with night's coming. The insects buzzed and hummed in dull cacophony in the shade of the trees, and the sounds of the ballplayers rose sharp and sudden with the ebb and flow of the games' action.
After a moment, she dropped back a step to walk beside him. "How long are you visiting?" she asked, wanting to know something more about him, about his involvement with her mother.
"Just a few days." His movements were steady and unhurried. "I think I'll stay for the fireworks. I hear they're pretty spectacular."
"You can sit with us, if you'd like," she offered. "That way you'll be with someone you know. You don't know anyone else in Hopewell, do you?"
He shook his head.
"This is your first visit?"
"This is my first visit."
They crossed the road at the divide and turned west toward the turnaround and the entry to Riverside. John Ross was looking off toward the cliffs, out to where the Rock River flowed west on both sides of the levy and the railroad tracks. Nest watched him out of the corner of her eye. He seemed to be seeing something beyond what he was looking at, his gaze distant and distracted, his expression riddled with pain. He looked almost young to her for an instant, as if the years had dropped away. She thought she could see the boy in him, the way he was maybe twenty years ago, the way he had been before his life had taken him down whatever rough road it was he had traveled.
"Were you in love with my mother?" she asked him suddenly.
He looked at her in surprise, his lean face intense, his green eyes startled. He shook his head. "I think I could have been if I had gotten to know her better, but I didn't get the chance." He smiled. "Isn't that tragic?"
They walked up through the spring-mounted children's toys toward the spruce groves. "You look like her," Ross said after a moment.
Nest glanced over at him, watching him limp alongside her, leaning on his staff, his gaze directed ahead to where they were going. "I don't think I do," she said. "I don't think I look like anybody. Which is just as well, because I don't much like the way I look, just at the moment."
Ross nodded. "We're our own worst critics, sometimes." Then he cocked an eyebrow at her. "But I like the way you look, even if you don't. So sue me.' "
She smiled in spite of herself. They passed through the spruce trees to the turnaround and the cliffs. There were two cars parked at the cliff edge and a family on the swings nearby.
She thought back to Bennett Scott and the feeders, picturing it in her mind, remembering the night and the heat and the fear. She thought about Two Bears and wondered suddenly if he was there in the park again. She glanced about to see if she could spy him, but he was nowhere in sight. She let her thoughts of Two Bears and the spirits of the dead Sinnissippi drift away.
She led Ross to the gap in the fence line and through to the cemetery beyond. They walked along the edge of the blacktop roadway, through the rows of marble and granite tombstones, across the immaculate grass carpet, and under the stately, silent old hardwoods. The mingled scents of pine and new-mown grass filled the air, rich and pungent. Nest found herself strangely at ease. John Ross made her feel that way. The longer she was with him, the more comfortable she felt-as if she had known him a long time rather than for only a few hours. It was in the way he talked to her, neither as a child nor as an adult, but simply as a person; in the way he moved, neither self-conscious nor protective of his damaged body, not favoring it in an obvious, discomforting way, accepting it as it was; and mostly in the way he was at peace with the moment, as if only the here and now mattered, as if taking this walk with her were enoug
h and what had gone before or what would come after had no place in his thoughts.
They walked through the rolling green of the cemetery and down its tree-shaded rows of markers to where her mother lay, out on a bluff overlooking the river and the land beyond. Her mother's headstone was gray with black lettering and bore the words BELOVED DAUGHTER & MOTHER just beneath her name, Caitlin Anne Freemark. Nest stared at the grave without speaking, immutable and remote, borne to other times and places on the wings of her thoughts.
"I don't remember her at all," she said finally, tears springing to her eyes with her admission.
John Ross looked off into the trees. "She was small and gentle, with sandy hair and blue-gray eyes you couldn't look away from. She was pretty, almost elfin. She was very smart, intuitive about things others would miss entirely. When she laughed, she could transport you to a better time and place in your life if you were sad or make you glad you were there with her if you were happy. She was daring and unafraid. She was never satisfied with just being told how something was; she always wanted to experience it for herself."
He stopped, went silent suddenly, as if he'd come up against something he did not care to explore any further. Nest did not try to look at him. She brushed at her eyes and bit her lip to steady herself. It was always like this when she came to visit. No matter how much time had passed, it was always the same.
Afterward, they walked back through the cemetery to the fence line in the waning light, listening to the dying sounds of a distant mower and the occasional honk of a car horn out on the highway. There was no one in the cemetery this night; its tree-sheltered, rolling green expanse was cradled in silence and empty of movement. The Midwest evening was sultry, the air tasted of sweat, and it felt as if time had slowed its inexorable march to a crawl. There was a sense of something slipping away, gone like chances at love or hopes for understanding.
"Thank you for telling me about her," Nest said quietly as they walked down the blacktop roadway toward the park fence. Her eyes were dry again and her mind was clear.
"Well, you remind me of her," John Ross replied after a moment. "That helps me in telling you what she was like."
"I have pictures," said Nest. "But it isn't the same."
"Not if you don't have the memories of the times those pictures capture, no." Ross limped steadily forward, his staff clicking softly against the blacktop with each step.
"I like your staff," Nest ventured. "Have you had it a long time?"
Ross glanced over at her and smiled. "Sometimes it seems like I have had it all my life. Sometimes it seems like I was born with it. I think maybe, in a sense, I was."
He didn't say anything more. They reached the fence and slipped through the gap and into the park once more. They were back at the turnaround, close by the cliffs. The twilight was deepening, the sun gone down behind the horizon, leaving only its crimson wake to light the world. The family on the swings and the two cars that had been parked at the turnaround were gone. In the distance, the baseball games were winding down.
In the shadows of the trees that bracketed the cliff edge, feeders were gathering, their squat, dark bodies shifting soundlessly, their yellow eyes winking like fireflies. As John Ross and Nest passed down the roadway, their numbers grew. And grew still more. Nest glanced left and right nervously, finding eyes everywhere, watching intently, implacably. Why were there so many? The chilling possibility crossed her mind that they intended to attack, all of them, too many to defend against. They had never done anything like that before, but there was nothing to say they wouldn't do so now. Feeders were nothing if not unpredictable. She tensed expectantly, wondering what she should do. Her heart beat fast and her breathing quickened.
"Don't let them bother you," John Ross told her quietly, his voice soft and calm. "They're not here because of you. They're here because of me."
He said it so matter-of-factly that for a moment the words didn't register. Then she looked at him in surprise and whispered, "You can see them?"
He nodded without looking at her, without appearing to look at anything. "As clearly as you can. It's why I'm here. It's why I've come. To help, if I can. I'm in service to the Word."
Nest was stunned. They continued to walk down the darkening roadway through the masses of feeders as if taking a garden stroll, and Nest fought to collect her thoughts.
"You know about the feeders, don't you?" he asked conversationally. "You know what draws them?" She nodded dully. "They are attracted to me because of the staff." She glanced over immediately, eyes fastening on its black, rune-scrolled walnut length. "The staff is a talisman, and its magic is very powerful. It was given to me when I entered into service to the Word. It is the weapon I carry into battle each and every day. It is also the ball and chain that binds me to my fate."
His words were muted and harsh, but strangely poetic as well, and Nest found herself looking at his face, seeing him anew. He did not look back, but continued to keep his gaze directed forward, away from her, away from the feeders.
"Are you a caretaker?" he asked after a moment. "Are you partnered with a sylvan to look after this park?"
The number of her questions doubled instantly, and she was confused all over again. "Yes. His name is Pick."
"I am a Knight of the Word," he said. "Has Pick told you of the Knights?"
She shook her head no. "Pick doesn't say much about anything that goes on outside of the park."
Ross nodded. They were even with the burial mounds now and turning in to the playground, stepping carefully over the low chain dividers. They moved across the twig-strewn grass beneath the hardwoods, solitary ghosts. Ahead, the baseball diamonds were filling with shadows and emptying of people. Nest could see lights beginning to come on in the houses of the subdivisions bordering the park and in the Sinnissippi Townhomes. Stars were beginning to appear in the darkening sky east, and a crescent moon hung suspended north across the river.
"Did you really know my mother?" Nest asked him, a twinge of doubt nudging at her, suspicious now of everything he had said.
He seemed not to have heard her. He said nothing for a moment, then slowed and looked over at her. "Why don't we sit somewhere and talk, and I'll tell you what I'm doing here."
She studied him carefully while he waited for her answer. "All right," she agreed finally.
They moved out of the hardwoods and away from the playground. The feeders that had been shadowing them fell away as they moved into the open again, unwilling to follow. They stayed on the west side of the road leading out of the park, away from the ball games that were ending and the players and fans packing up their blankets and gear, and moved to a picnic table just at the edge of a solitary spruce close by the crossbar.
They sat across from each other in the failing light, the girl and the man, and they might have been either confidants or combatants from the set of their shoulders and the positioning of their hands, and in the vast, empty space of night and sky that closed about them, their words could not be heard.
"This is how I became a Knight of the Word," John Ross said softly, his green eyes steady and calm as they fixed on her.
And he told Nest Freemark his story.
Chapter 14
He was still a young man when he began his odyssey, not yet turned thirty. He was drifting again, as he had been drifting for most of his life. He had earned an undergraduate degree in English literature (he had done his senior thesis on William Faulkner), and his graduation had marked the conclusion of any recognizable focus in his life. Afterward, he had migrated to a series of different schools and graduate programs, twice coming close to completing his masters, each time stepping back when he got too close. He was a classic case of an academic unready and unwilling to confront the world beyond the classroom. He was intelligent and intuitive; he was capable of finding his way. The problem with John Ross was always the same. The way never seemed important enough for him to undertake the journey.
He had always been like that. He had
excelled in school from an early age, easily gaining honors recognition, effortlessly garnering high praise and enthusiastic recommendations. While he was attending school full-time, while he was required to be there, it was never necessary that he consider doing anything more. It was a comfortable, regimented, encapsulated existence, and he was happy. But with his graduation it became apparent that he must point toward something specific. He might have become a teacher, and thus remained within the classroom, kept himself safe within an academic confinement, but teaching did not interest him. It was the discovery that mattered, the uncovering of truths, the deciphering of life's mysteries that drew him into his studies. And so he moved from college to university, from graduate studies in American literature to funded research in Greek history, all the while waiting for the light to shine down the road his life must necessarily take.
It did not happen, though, and as he approached the age of thirty, he began to think that it never would. His parents, always supportive of him, were beginning to despair of his life. An only child, he had always been the sole focus of their expectations and hopes. They did not say so, but he could read their concerns for him in their studied silence. They no longer supported him-he had long since learned the art of securing scholarships and grants-so money was not an issue. But his options for continued study were drawing to a close, and he was still nowhere close to choosing a career. What could he do with his English degree and his raft of almost completed esoteric studies? If he didn't choose to teach, what could he do? Sell insurance or cars or vacuum cleaners? Go into business? Work for the government? When none of it mattered, when nothing seemed important enough, what could he do?
He chose to go to England. He had saved some money, and he thought that perhaps a trip abroad might give him fresh insight. He had never been outside the United States, save for a brief trip into Canada in his teens and a second into Mexico in his early twenties. He had no experience as a tourist, barely any experience in life beyond the classroom, but he was persuaded to take the plunge by his growing desperation. He would be going to an English-speaking country (well, of course), and he would be discovering (he hoped) something about his substantially English heritage. His one extracurricular activity throughout school had been hiking and camping, so he was strong and able to look after himself. He had some contacts at a few of the universities, and he would find help with lodging and shelter. Perhaps he would even find a smidgen of guest-lecturer work, although that was not important to him. What mattered was removing himself from his present existence in an effort to find his future.
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