dirt gardener

The town still doesn't have a name; it never has. It's just a town, a little squat of houses maybe ten long by ten wide, a handful of iles southwest of LR. A sweeping crew goes out every morning, while the sky is still the color of a watermelon's insides, to clean up the sand that's scattered through its bare hardpan roads overnight and check the fortifications that are supposed to keep it out, and only sort of do. People light candles and lanterns after dusk, but not many of them push a day long past the light. They rise just before the sun, and set shortly after it, and pull up water from the wells they've dug. People make do.

The town doesn't have a name, and closer inspection will reveal something else it lacks, something you wouldn't think it could survive without. But it has. It makes do, too.

Everybody knows there's nothing south of here; nothing but scrubland and sky and the occasional nest of sandworms. There are no trucks already going that way to hitch a ride with, but if you pay enough, someone's usually willing. For the right number of dollars they'll do it, whatever it may be. Sad but true -- and sometimes, even useful.

"You sure you want me to let you off here?"

His name is Ralph Farmer, he's 57 years old, and he used to drive his rig between LR and Augusta, back before Augusta became the casualty of some kind of cruel joke on the fifth moon. He started driving to May after that, but once people started disappearing between the frontier and the northern cities, he decided a much better idea would be to retire early, to a life of simple supply runs between LR and offshoot towns like this one. Of course, then there was that incident in LR...

She's heard all of this in the course of the last twenty minutes' drive straight into the unpeopled desert, and also that Ralph has a wife and "three mouths to feed" -- presumably with children attached to them -- who live in town, and that back when he still drove, he transported trucks full of cotton yarn. "For making textiles," he added, in the tones of someone who just doesn't care anymore if whoever he's talking to knows what those are or not. She is now thoroughly well-acquainted with the personage of Ralph Farmer, and they've only been driving five iles or so. But she doesn't mind. Some people just put their hands on the wheel and right away need to open their mouths.

"I mean, there's nothin' out here, miss," he continues with his hesitant protest; the thin layer of sweat on his forehead beads slightly when his brow wrinkles. He is squat, dark, and compact, built to match his surname, and his plaid shirt is tattered but clean. His face is sheeplike and earnest, and he leans across the seat she's just vacated with one slab of a forearm braced on the torn-up red vinyl that, kind of like Ralph, can't help spilling its guts. "Gonna be dark before too long, besides."

She smiles patiently, her boot up on the sideboard but her hand up and ready to close the door (which don't quite shut right, Ralph has informed her, 'cause of a run-in he done had a while back with some bandits, take care not to lean up against her) at any minute. "I'll be fine from here," she says again. "Thanks for all your help."

Ralph's brow crinkles a little further; you could get lost in the cracks. "I don't like to leave a lady out here alone," he starts up again, but she catches him there.

"I'm no lady," she says, and opens up her light black jacket to pat the holster snuggled under her breast. She tries not to grin at his round surprised mouth: O. "You go along, Mr. Farmer; I don't want to keep you."

When he's pulled away, spilling up clouds of fine sand around the back grinding fans of his truck, she turns, and starts to walk around. He's right about one thing, she thinks; it'll be dark soon.

*

Someone once said that a frontier town is any place with more gravestones than people. By that definition, I suppose the frontier begins just south of May. Or, if you wanted to speak in grand metaphors, you could say this whole world is a frontier. I don't think you'd be so far off if you did.

The garden dries sometimes, and sometimes it blooms. I know this, and still every blossom that shrivels without ever giving fruit keeps me up at night, wondering what I did wrong. I lie awake, eyes closed, and try to reach out into the darkness, until I feel like I can almost hear the sound of things growing from outside. I listen until the rumbling of stalks shooting up, the roar of the dirt they push aside, fills up my head and makes it impossible to think of anything else. And then it seems like I can hear everything: the hair growing on my head, the scrape of the air against my skin, and around it all the steady, world-filling drum of my heartbeat. I take everything one beat at a time; and after that, I can sleep.

Is that a living, or a life? I don't know. But it gets the job done.

*

"Excuse me, ma'am. Are you Miss Stryfe?"

The woman looks up, momentarily startled; it lends her a temporary innocence she loses with the arrival of her gently exasperated smile. She might be in her forties, with cool blue eyes and dark straight hair that curves down to her shoulders, pinstriped waitress's uniform sagging on her petite body and her apron and heels in a paper bag in one hand. "Not for thirteen years," she answers, walking past to the front steps of her house. "Mrs. Donaldson."

The woman standing by her doorstep smiles amiably, hands in the pockets of her coat. "Ah, sorry. That's just the name they gave me down the store." She gestures behind her. Mrs. Meryl Donaldson watches her with bemused eyes, and she knows how odd they must look; the tiny waitress just coming home and the tall, lanky girl strung somewhere in the wastes between twenty and thirty, short red hair flopping across her forehead, narrow and genderless in her black jacket, jeans, and dusty boots. Two peas in a hell of a weird pod, she thinks, and sticks out a hard, callused hand. "I'm Lina Cheryl. I don't suppose you'd let me take up some of your time this afternoon, Mrs. Donaldson?"

The older woman shifts her bag to her other hand to accept the handshake, automatically; her hand is small and delicate, and nearly disappears in Lina's. "Can it wait a little?" she asks, resignedly, making another weak effort to ascend the porch. The taller woman steps back out of the way this time, easily. "I've just gotten off work; if I could just get inside and change -- "

"Oh, sure, ma'am, I'm in no hurry." She brings out the smile again, but it fails to span the distance between them; leaving it aside, she tries another way. "I just heard you knew Vash the Stampede, is all."

Meryl Donaldson, who has been fumbling with the complex science of holding onto the bag and getting her key in the door, drops her task abruptly and turns around. The look they give each other then is enough to seal just about anything. Sometimes women just know.

*

Millie sends me letters; once a week, regular as clockwork. You could set your watch by them. I wonder sometimes if she's been up all night the night before the way I remember her doing, carefully stringing the words together on page after page. "Dear ma'am," she begins every one. Neither one of us has received a check stamped with Bernardelli's imperious logo in at least sixteen years, but that never stopped our Millie. I'm not entirely sure she even knows my first name. She lives at home, with her family, and she works on the farm and seems very happy, or at least very content. The distinction, again, is important. I'm not exactly surprised she didn't want to go back to the city and the insurance company, once it was over; nor do I blame her. After all, look where I am. Her letters are full of farming news, stories of irrigation woes and barn-raisings and runaway thomases, long lists of which cousins and nieces and nephews are starting to get married to which neighbors and start spawning cousins twice removed. Much as she loves all the children, and of course she does, there's never any mention of a husband-presumptive for Millie. Somehow, that doesn't surprise me, either.

I remember so clearly the look on her face when she told me she was leaving. She had to go back, she said: to make her report, and see her family. They were all worried about her. All right, Millie, I said; I'll miss you. And the look in her eyes asked me questions for which I had no answers, nor do I think I ever will.

*

Meryl has changed into a blouse and slacks, and now she and Lina sit out on the porch with a glass of iced tea and a beer, of course respectively. Like two women talking about the most natural things in the world, Lina thinks. Actually, she guesses they are. It doesn't get much more natural than life and death, does it?

"Where are you from, Miss Cheryl? This is a rather long way from anywhere, of course..."

"Lina, please." Her easygoing grin is met with a cautious smile.

"Then Meryl, too."

She swigs her beer; it's not cold, but it's cool, and cool is at least better than warm, she figures. "I'm from a town a lot like this one: little, no name that anybody remembers. A few iles outside Augusta. Well -- where Augusta used to be."

Meryl lifts her eyebrows, draping her arms across her knees as she settles on the otherside of the stoop. "Augusta? That's almost a week from here by steamer. What brings you such a long way?"

A shrug, and she takes another drink. "I'm a marshall; I do a lot of traveling anyway, and I was curious to follow his trail -- Vash's -- a little ways, if I could. I kept asking until I finally found someone who knew where he'd last been seen, and they said here. So I got some time off this year, and I decided to come down here and look around." Her lips twist over the bottleneck, a look like she's bitten something sour. "Hard to get people to talk to a fed, around here."

Meryl laughs; it isn't precisely an honest sound, but it's good to hear from a mouth that turns out so much thoughtful silence. "Don't worry. They don't talk to anyone around here; it's just that they use more words when they don't talk to each other." She pauses, gathering words, and the wind fills the space. "You're a marshall?" The younger woman nods. "I hope you're not thinking there's a case in this. It's been seventeen years..."

"No, no -- this is strictly personal." She stares across the street, watching the dust the wind stirs up. Somewhere, a woman is calling her kid in from the street. As far as ambient noises go, all towns are pretty much the same. "I knew him too," she says at last. Her voice is quiet. She can feel Meryl's sharp look from the side, but she doesn't turn her head.

"But -- " She hesitates. "I don't mean to be rude, but... you couldn't have been more than a girl when that was all going on."

"Eleven," Lina confirms good-naturedly. "I didn't know him all that long, but he was kind of like a big brother to me. I just wanted to see where he ended up, after he left." She glances at Meryl; the older woman is gaping but trying to be polite about it, and Lina smiles. "It's a long story. I'm sure you understand."

*

They still call me by my maiden name, which I imagine should irritate me more than it does. But it's the name they first knew me by, so I suppose it's the name I'll wear around here until I die. Some days, when I'm a little depressed anyway, it'll start to seem like a calculated effort; like they're saying that even if I married one of their boys, I'll still never belong here. We remember when you came here, their eyes seem to say when they speak to me, and it was much too late for you to be one of us. We remember. We'll always remember that you went to your knees in front of a cocked gun, and ignored a woman crying and a man screaming at you to stop, thinking you could save him. We'll remember that you brought in a man known for wrecking people's lives, and defended him when we tried to get our own back. We'll remember you at the window, staring at the stars. We'll remember you as you came to us, foreign and strange and without an inch of sense just to wrap around yourself and keep you warm, and with our memories we'll make a wall to keep you just outside of forever. That's what we do with girls like you; the ones who don't know enough to stay home.

I wonder what they think of my garden, which I know is a silly thing to wonder. They'd probably call it a waste of time to each other, if they bothered to think of it at all. Well, let them. Just let them.

*

"We weren't staying in this house, of course, or I'd show you around; we'd just brought him in from what happened at LR, and we were renting a few rooms, on the other side of town. He was... badly wounded."

Lina nods, solemnly. She's not what anyone would call a pretty woman, but her strong features are attractive in a handsome way, and more so when she concentrates like this. She doesn't know it herself, but Meryl has noticed. "How much of the stories is true?" Lina asks. Meryl shakes her head, and her face tightens defensively.

"Almost nothing, of course. If you knew him, you know he wouldn't harm anyone."

"That's not what I mean," Lina counters patiently. That choice of words -- if you knew him -- hangs heavy on the air between them for a moment, however. Finally, Meryl sighs.

"What've you heard?"

Lina shrugs, and leans back against the shaky wooden porch railing. Somehow, they've made their way to standing up; it's funny, the way people will move themselves around without noticing while they're talking, like the creep of light across a floor as the day goes by. "The relevant stuff? That he came here after something happened at LR. That he left town, headed south, after a couple weeks, to go do something. That he never came back. That he died out there. And that you were with him until that." She pauses, letting Meryl absorb that. A kid -- maybe the same one who was being summoned earlier -- is yelling. "Is it true?"

Meryl looks at her squarely: the patented go-ahead-and-try-me face. "That it was to the south? Probably; he left headed that way, for certain. That he died? I don't know, I wasn't there. But that he never came back... yes, that's true." She wraps her arms around herself, hesitating, and then adds, "That I was with him, yes. But you know that."

"Sure do." She pushes herself off the railing, back onto her own two feet. "I think I've put you out, ma'a -- Meryl. I didn't mean to keep you talking about something that bothers you."

"It's no bother -- " Meryl begins halfheartedly, but Lina waves her off.

"Anyway, I probably don't have too many hours left before dusk, so I should be getting on. But I wonder -- would you be so kind as to point me the right way?"

Every expression Meryl has looks like a textbook example. See, boys and girls, this is taken aback. "The right way? To where?"

Lina smiles, mostly because they both know the answer is obvious before the question can even be finished. "The way he was going," she says simply.

*

It was a beautiful day; the weather was even a little cooler than usual. Strange, since it's so hot here, even comparatively. At least back north, there are some plants here and there that can sink their taproots far enough to reach water, and it even rains from time to time. I saw it a few times, back in the city, once when I was just a little girl. I was so frightened that first time -- imagine, water falling from the sky! But as you go south, the suns get stronger; the soil thins out to a sandy powder a foot deep over the hardpan, and the groundwater burrows its way down as far under the ground as it can. Out here, it isn't just wasteland; it's really desert.

And about how it ended, that is all I know.

*

The cliff outside town stands to the south like a great stone face of a god, staring down the desert. Lina finds herself feeling like an invader as she follows Meryl across its top; like this is someone else's private space, long since marked and forgotten. Did he come here? she wonders, but she would rather not ask. Not just now.

The older woman comes to a stop at the precipice, and points out over the desert. "There," she says firmly, in a voice that leaves no room for doubt. Her hand doesn't waver, either. "When it was still grown over, we could see it from here; it was just that way. Go just about five iles, and you should find the spot. It's probably... still noticeable."

Lina smiles, in a way that says if she had a hat, she'd be tipping it. "Much obliged."

"Not as much as you might think," Meryl says softly. Lina cocks her head, but doesn't ask for clarification. Let the river run where it may, as they say.

"If you don't mind my prying a little more, how did you meet Eri -- Vash?" The false start makes her sigh at herself, and it's Meryl's turn to tilt her head and say nothing.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," she answers instead, with a bit of a wistful smile. "But... he was a good friend, I think. A very good friend." She smiles again; an honest one this time. "And you?"

Lina turns this over for a few seconds, then laughs. "You probably wouldn't believe me either," she agrees. "'Course, what that might mean is we'd believe each other just fine."

Meryl smiles. "There's one other thing up here you might like to see," she says, with no preamble whatsoever. Lina blinks, and then shrugs cheerfully.

"Sure."

The dark-haired woman leads the way back across the cliff top, to where the ledge meets another cliff face; it protrudes up to a ragged edge that ends high above, making a sort of wall that curls into the cliff they stand on. She searches for a little bit, making a few little hmming sounds to herself, while Lina fights the wind to keep from being knocked down. At last, she finds a fissure in the rock and slips right inside it, disappearing into the cliff. "In here," she calls, obviously, and Lina follows. The cranny is a little tighter around her than around Meryl, but that's not saying much; it would be cramped for a man of substantial size, but not impossible to negotiate. She squirms her way in next to Meryl, like a pair of sardines, and follows the line of the older woman's finger up to the rock wall.

A little ways up, on one of the flatter places in the turbulent stone, there's a chalk drawing, carefully sketched in and shaded by a hand of reasonable talent. It's old by now, a little worn, but its place here between walls has kept it sheltered from the worst of the fading of sunlight, and of course there has been no rain to wash it away. A man's face in profile, a negative image in white chalk on red stone; a thatch of thick hair, pensive and almost upslanted eyes, a large sharp nose, faint shadow of stubble over his jaw. They stand silent for a moment, looking. The details alone would make it unmistakable; the cigarette, stuck in a brooding mouth apparently as an afterthought, just reiterates the obvious.

"What happened to him, anyway?" Lina asks, after a moment, as if they'd been speaking all this time.

"He died," is Meryl's simple reply. "A few towns over."

Lina looks at the picture. It really answers her next question by itself, but she figures she'd rather ask the thing than let it go to waste. "Before or after?"

"Before."

She nods. Carefully, one by one, they work their way back out of the rocks and into the light.

*

Keeping history in the desert is a difficult task, made even more difficult by its pointlessness. Out here it's easier to count time in years than in days, and even then, why bother? They follow each other, and each mirrors the one before: no life to tell the story of the seasons. Except, perhaps, for that in tiny, ill-planned gardens, struggling on year after year.

I wish her well only because she'll need it. Memory is nobody's friend; it eats us all alive.

*

By the time the sun sets, Lina has already paced out the perimeter of the spot, the rough circle of whatever mysterious last stand her outlaw made, now faded under nearly two decades of dust. From close up, it isn't that hard to identify: a faint discoloration that makes a dark lopsided circle under the sand, maybe half an ile across north by south and three quarters east-west. When she finished walking its edge and actually crossed out into the middle, she noticed, with policeman's instincts, that the sand gritted funnily under her boots where it was darker, like biting into a bit of food with just a few grains of sand in it (a condition with which few colony citizens are entirely unfamiliar). Curious, she stooped down to touch the ground, and then to brush away the sand that covered it in one small patch. Maybe a foot deep, she discovered the source of both the texture and the color: underneath the area was a huge bowl of black glass, bubbly and raggedly cracked. As if some disaster here had burned all the sand in this small radius down to liquid, maybe seventeen years ago.

She covered it again then, and walked out to the middle of the depression; and there she sat down, on the weirdly gritty sand.

And now the sun is gone, leaving only a red smear where it slid down under the horizon, and despite the encroaching cold, Lina still sits. If she smoked, she reflects, she would be doing it now, but she doesn't; one sort of practical meditation is as good as another, though, and so she has her gun out on her lap -- spread carefully over with her black jacket, which has seen worse abuses in its time -- and is cleaning it, thoughtfully. When your hands are busy, your mind gets busy too, that's true as anything. Or, in the cases of such illustrious personages as Ralph Farmer, your mouth, but there's nobody to talk to out here. Or at least, nobody who would answer.

Her grandmother had first taught her how to clean a gun; Grandma Cheryl, so named to everyone, though she was Lina's grandmother alone. The girl's parents -- Grandma Cheryl's son and daughter-in-law -- had been lost to an ugly spring windstorm when Lina was five, and the two women had looked after each other ever since... or at least, until Eriks. Not that his arrival had stopped them from doing so, of course, but it did broaden their little seesaw into a steadier, happy triangle for a while, and that was something, wasn't it?

It was Eriks -- not Vash, not out here; with no other faces from his elusive past around, any name will do -- who actually taught her how to fire a gun, and though this should have seemed strange fromt he big, gentle man, it didn't. Not to them, anyway, having seen those scars Every scar comes from somewhere. Eriks taught her more than how to fire, too; he taught her how to shoot, and also the distinction between the two. How to shoot to wound, not kill. How to end a fight without ending a life. Eriks's expression wasn't fun or goofy or gentle on those occasions, those lessons, she remembers, but dead serious. He looked like somebody who was doing the worst thing in the world because there was no other choice. It scared her a little at the time, though not in any immediate way, like a sandstorm or bandits riding through town -- nothing like that. Kids have a pretty good sense of whether somebody will hurt them, when they have the brains to listen to it, and Lina believed -- and still believes -- that Eriks would have cut off his own hand first. Not that he had one to spare. No; it scared her because when he looked like that, it made her remember that the man behind those round steel-rimmed glasses (which he insisted he was blind as a bat without and which she knew for a fact he was not) was somebody that, really, she knew nothing about. Nothing at all.

"The first rule of shooting," he said, on one of those dusty blue afternoons behind the ranch house, as they stood side-by-side in front of a chunk of siding with a remarkably accurate man-shape chalked on it for a target, "is easy: don't." He sighed, and yanked back his too-long hair into a short tail at the back of his head, fastening it there: the day had been, like every other one, hot. He looked silly like that, as she usually wasted no time pointing out, and scruffy, but charming, too. And at any other time but this, much younger than he usually looked. "And the second rule is, unless you have to." He picked up the small revolver they were practicing with then, sighting it easily but with a look of distaste that she still remembers. "And the third is, if you have to shoot, shoot as low as you can. Getting shot in the foot isn't fun, and it'll generally take just about anybody's mind off any other trouble they're trying to make, but it's pretty easy to survive. Getting shot in the head, less so."

Bang. She put a hand over her eyes as the sun glinted off the revolver's barrel, and when she took it away, the oily gunsmoke had cleared just enough for her to see the neat hole right through the chalk man's chalk foot. Bang bang, then, too quick to see it coming, and now Mr. Chalk sported a matching hold cleanly through the center of his other foot, and yet another in his right shoulder, far out toward the arm. Eriks didn't even bother to look at the target -- and that stays with her to this day too, that total, weird disinterest -- but just turned to her, holding out the gun butt-first.

"One of the hardest things in the world is to beat somebody who's shooting to kill, when you're not," he said, with that tone that was both resigned and somehow sad. "You need to remember that."

She does. She always has. Everything he taught her has stayed with her, and if it hadn't, she doubts she'd even be a marshall now, let alone a good one. That was what he left her, the best gift of all: self-sufficiency, at the expense of no one else. And a good thing, too. Three years after the priest had come and taken Eriks away with him -- a different Eriks, with a gun on his hip and a name that wasn't Eriks, and an older, tougher look behind his eyes -- Lina's grandmother died, leaving her alone at fifteen years old, to take care of herself. But in Eriks's lingering wake, she'd known what she wanted to do, and she did it. That was the magic he left. Possibility.

Hope.

And in a way, albeit a completely different way, she thinks he also left that gift with the woman who is back in town now, no doubt having dinner with her husband and daughter. Mrs. Meryl Donaldson is still a little like a woman who's been sleepwalking in a shadow so long she thinks she's passed out of it, but if she's content in that dream, who is Lina to wake her? That hope lives in Meryl too, at any rate, maybe biding its time but still alive. It lives in the hotel window she no longer sits at, from which she no longer watches the desert and waits for it to return its prize.

It's in the little no-name town, too, although Lina has not noticed this; in that very important item it lacks.

Dark has come to the desert now, and the stars are putting in an appearance, in all their amazing multitudes. Whatever else may come, the stars will still be there, even when none of the children of this world know to call them home. This could be comforting, but Lina doesn't need the comfort. No shadow lies over her. At twenty-eight years old, Lina Cheryl is very interested in the business of living, as she believes -- and rightly so -- that she has a lot of it left to do.

She snaps her gun back together and holsters it again, and then she gets to her feet, dusting off the sand that clings to the legs of her jeans. Time to get back to civilization, before it gets too late. If she'd had flowers, she might have left them, but she doesn't, and that's probably all right. It's better to leave nothing behind, sometimes.

Starlight guides her back, and the bluish, unromantic light of the two moons that are up tonight; it's not a bad walk, not under the cool of darkness. She picks her way along in the tracks of packed-down sand left by Ralph Farmer's rig, where the walking is easiest. She doesn't look back.

*

I would like to say that she left something at the spot; something to mark its nature, something more than a patch of darker sand. Perhaps a stone, or perhaps a flower -- perhaps even a red one, blissfully unaware of the grand symbolism of the gesture. A small, red flower, growing like a miracle up out of the earth. That would be a good moral of the story, a good final metaphor to fade to black on. I would like to say that. But even though I wasn't there, I know she didn't. She left with only what she had on her, and came back with only the same, like the sensible girl I could see she is. We don't have anything to spare these days, not even to leave behind us and mark where and who we've been, and metaphors need to be used sparingly, if at all. It's already a luxury just to be able to say what you mean, let alone to use it to say something else.

In this town without a Plant we struggle, and some of us survive, and some don't. We're working on a wind-powered generator, for electricity; we've sunk wells into the earth time and again, and though we had to dig a ways, we've always found water. We keep the sand out with our own hands. And we get along. I don't know what we'll do if, someday, a bucket comes up dry from the well, nor do I know what we'll try if the wind refuses to be harnessed for our purposes, but these questions, I sense, are not the ones that matter. There is only one that does, and it is this: Can it be done?

And our answer, which is our pride: Yes. It can.

The Plants may not be forever, and perhaps neither are we, but the answer does not change. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It's a world of refusal, of denial, of mulish pig-headed stubbornness... and of hope. We can, and we will. We will hang on tooth and nail; if we must go, we will not go quietly. It swells me with exasperated pride.

You left us that; both the pride and the exasperation. You left ripples where you never even trailed your hand. And for you, for what you gave and still give, I say it again: Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

*

Lina leaves first thing in the morning, heading back to LR to take a sand steamer home. For this, she once again engages the services of Ralph Farmer, mostly because she wants to hear more about his wife and those three voracious mouths of theirs. She likes hearing people's stories. It never even occurs to her to stop and say goodbye to Meryl before she leaves; it would be against the rules, somehow.

They drive through the desert, Ralph chattering good-naturedly away. At one of the lulls in the conversation -- which are more like Ralph pausing for breath -- without even knowing why, she says, "I hear Vash the Stampede stayed out here for a while, back in the day. You ever meet him?"

Ralph laughs, as if to say that such an old legend is all but forgotten in this day and age. Time is an amazing thing, she thinks to herself; just twenty years ago, say that name and you would have gotten almost superstitious terror, probably even from this very man. "Not me," Ralph says. "I remember there bein' a lot of commotion about it, but I was out of town, on deliveries. Tell the truth, I ain't even convinced he was here. Hear a rumor that he'd been nearby, and suddenly everybody in the county'd seen 'im. Myself, if he had any brains, I doubt he went around showin' his face that much."

She suppresses a smile; Ralph Farmer is cannier than he looks. "That so? So you don't think he was some big crazy town-wrecking bandit?"

Ralph snorts. "Naw. Like I say, I never met the guy, but I figure he couldn'ta been as bad's all that. I mean, sure, all them towns got wrecked, but I don't think any one guy smart enough to keep himself outta jail all that time would be dumb enough to do all that damage by himself. Prob'ly he was just a joe like anybody else, got in over his head, screwed some stuff up without meanin' to, and he turned into the kinda guy towns just fall down around. Coulda been anybody. If you'll pardon my language, miss -- shit happens, you know?"

*

I have lived in this town for six thousand, three hundred and forty-eight days. Every one of them, every morning that I didn't leave, I justified to myself, thinking one more couldn't hurt, could it? But I don't need that anymore, not now. I want to stay because this is my home. My family is here, and so am I, and so will we all be until we are nowhere at all. This is where my garden grows, and that may be the closest definition of home that I'll ever need.

Hope grows in my garden, too; and it's the one crop that needs the most tending of all. It can die in a heartbeat, and flower when you least expect it. That much I know, and have always known.

*

Yes. She does know.

Would it have pleased him, to hear that said about him? Lina thinks it would have. Being just like anybody else is a treasure few people properly appreciate, but she'd bet he would have been one of them. Poor Eriks. Let him be forgotten; let the world show him that mercy.

The desert rolls by, flat dust and sharp, startling cliff walls, under an eternity of blue sky. She watches it go, listening to Ralph with a corner of her mind -- he's talking about something else now, how they make the synthetic cotton that he used to transport. And after a while, she notices that she's smiling.

It's going to be a beautiful day.

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