7 August didn’t feel so young anymore. He ate berries over a sink in the kitchen of a little house Hosea directed they hold up in. Its lawn faced a winding road that ran uphill, and traveling it by foot to forage what they considered suitable left his legs tinder and full each morning. Forests surrounded the home on every side but the front; mushrooms and berries, like Hedgehog mushrooms and raspberries, were almost everywhere. The boy, August, would love to have baked something with them, but he hadn’t yet learned how to make dough. Besides, Hosea had a hard time keeping the huckleberries away from him. The smell of burning tobacco wormed through the open window above the sink, and August pictured Hosea leaning against the railing of the patio while he put a match to his shag.
The sun hadn’t raised completely, so the air held onto the moon's crispness. But it was light enough to see the early birds among the deer pick grass with their teeth that quiet morning. A mist hovered like a visibly dense gas heavy enough to delay a brisk walk. Trunk decor trembled in the presence of sharp-top mountains. The only thing missing was the smell of grease in a skillet. By a sniff of the leaf, the boy knew Hosea smoked nearby. It only became more intense as the seconds went. A latch on the front door rattled and clinked. Hosea opened the door the same way he always had—slow at first, paused to greet August, and stepped through without swinging it all the way. A Black man with a baseball cap and a pistol at his hip slipped into the house, mimicking Hosea. Another man followed a second after the Black one, wearing a short rifle on his chest. August heard Hosea’s greeting from deep within the house, and each step he took sounded like he landed on a stick when he walked from the kitchen to the small open space with a coffee table on a rug to meet his guardian. Three men were standing in front of him. Each man had a gun. August just wanted to watch the sunrise.
“Did you sleep?” Hosea asked the boy.
August seemed to be in shock. He couldn’t say a word.
“What did you dream of?” He dug for something deep.
August cautiously looked at the two strangers.
“It’s OK—they know.”
“Who are they?” August managed to ask.
Hosea took a second to pull the oddly shaped cigarette from his mouth after inhaling through it, then turned to his left to point with the same hand. A fog spilled from his lips. “This is Jeremy,” Hosea said. “And this is Gareth.” The men nodded. “They’ll take care of you while I’m gone.”
“Gone?”
Hosea smoked again and studied August’s face.
“What did you dream of?”
“I don’t remember.”
“OK,” Hosea acknowledged. “Did you hope to catch the sunrise?”
August couldn’t discern which of Hosea’s questions he truly wanted answered. He did want to see the sunrise, however. It would have been the first he’d seen from that part of America. They plodded over the pavement during the dead of night, heading east of Raleigh, North Carolina—it was safest when going from city to city. Soft light meant the duo would gather their belongings, packing them away until the sun set again. Halfway between the market back in Raleigh and their destination several cities over, Hosea organized the pickup of a vehicle to carry them the rest of the way to Bryson City, where they found themselves a home isolated and hidden among the trees.
The nature in Bryson City was already turning green—the color of olive. Not far from the house was a lake with fresh, blue water that quietly spoke through the flow of the connecting creeks; sharp shapes of light layered on top of the bending, blue glass. The roads weren’t even badly damaged there; August felt he would need to jump over the cracks in a road just outside of Greensboro, North Carolina if he were to walk it. He was glad to have moved away from that place. It felt like they were on another planet. Hosea’s voice registered differently with the peace of the land respecting his language. It’s just that August didn’t like what he had to say.
“Are you leaving me here? I didn’t ask for this,” August said.
“August, I have a job,” Hosea replied.
Hosea almost laughed at that, as it sounded too casual. But the house remained silent besides the ruffling of the ambiguous one’s cargo pants.
“So do the rest of us—responsibilities, like this one. We didn’t come all this way just to—” August said.
“Excuse me—I have to take a piss,” Jeremy, the black stranger, interrupted.
Hosea pulled from his cigarette again and squinted his right eye, a spec of impatience bothered him beneath his lid. “Of course. It’s just past the kitchen.”
Jeremy fixed his hat and carefully walked past August, who didn’t move and kept his eyes on Hosea. Gareth told the room he would wait outside and grabbed Hosea’s tin and matchbox. The floor creaked on his way out. Then, two were left alone in the living space. A clarifying breeze respectfully entered through the open door.
“I think it’s wrong of you to leave me here,” August said.
After a breath, Hosea said: “You don’t understand—”
“You dragged me here, and I didn’t ask you to drag me here. Now I’m—I don’t know how many miles away from home, in an unfamiliar place. And America just may be scarier than the lab.” August’s accent was clammy and thick at the end of some words.
“I saved you,” Hosea contested, stepping toward him.
Then, August moved.
“You were the one who was sent for me! And they’ll get to me eventually, especially now that I’m conveniently beneath their foot. So, I guess you’ll get me, too. This way just takes a little longer.”
“I chose what was best for you at that moment,” Hosea turned and threw his hands on his head, the smoke on his jacket stinking the room.
He then turned over his shoulder to plead with the boy. “Don’t act like I didn’t set you free from years of mistreatment; the tubes you told me about, and how you were on an IV for most of your days.”
“You chose what was best for you,” August said, contesting Hosea’s point. “But then again, you chose this life. Now, you reap what you sow.”
This froze Hosea. The toilet being flushed was heard through the wall. Then there was the opening and closing of a door, several cushioned footsteps through the kitchen, and Jeremy returned to his original spot without considering the weight of the room.
After he settled into place he asked: “Where’s Gareth?”
Hosea and August locked eyes with an unshakable stare. Hosea then sighed and turned from the boy, after a slow blink, while holding two fingers to his mouth as he pulled at his tobacco. A set of keys attached to his belt loop scraped against one another. He quietly closed the front door behind him, and the door jam squealed.
Jeremy finally realized the air of an argumentative spirit, as he felt the soft wind fuse with the warm breath from the disagreement. “Yeah,” he placed his hands on his waist after Hosea’s footsteps faded. “I don’t like him either,” Jeremy told August who appeared to be looking for a memory.
The room situated into the muted cushion suddenly presented, but over time it began to feel stiff and hard to the slap. After not getting a response from the boy, Jeremy asked: “You hungry?”
Luckily there were wild chickens in a field near the neighbor’s house. It was likely there was an ancient coop nearby that attracted them. Maybe a storm knocked some entirely too old feed onto the ground. It’d be rotten, that’s for sure. The houses in that area belonged to the wildlife, and most were filled with useful things the wild couldn’t utilize. Too bad it was all uphill and more than a mile and a half away. Jeremy said he could tell which chicken would lay eggs, and they planned on carting back a few to start a sustainable formula for feeding themselves.
“The only thing I haven’t done is make dough,” Jeremy admitted, unprovoked. His backpack clipped across his chest. The thumb of his left hand hooked under the strap of his bag, he gripped the handle of some sort of hand truck meant to haul their supplies with his free hand. The sun had risen by then, summer was on the verge and it was apparent to Jeremy that August was still upset, but he didn’t exactly know what about. “I’ll teach myself, though. You know, there used to be bread factories. I’ve seen what’s left of them. You can still smell the yeast. Imagine all the bread you can eat. A bread buffet.”
He looked at the boy who agreed to join him in securing chickens and eggs. If they were going to make it through the summer, they would need a sensible way to eat without over-exerting themselves. The two of them matched each other’s walking pattern. Jeremy adjusted his backpack. August kept his hands in his pockets.
“You have an accent. Where are you from? The South?”
“I thought Hosea told you about me,” August responded.
“Mhm,” Jeremy agreed. “But just about why you needed protection. Like, you’re not just some kid, right? Someone’s looking for you or something?”
“I don’t think so,” August said. He slid his feet across the road, disturbing the loose gravel, gluing his eyes to the tops of his shoe as he did so.
“Well, that’s good. You haven’t been alive long enough to make enemies. Someone like me—I’ve made plenty. But all it does is keep you cautious of everyone, looking over your shoulder as many hours as you sleep.”
August was outwardly uninterested in where the conversation was going, and they had at least thirty minutes of walking ahead. Not to mention the forty minutes back. The ascending road didn’t help—it felt as steep as the foot of a mountain. Jeremy skipped to the next topic.
“I’ve known Hosea for years,” he started. “We were kids together. I mean, we were kids and lived together. Then he went off and got recruited, is what they said. I was there when he lost his hearing in his ear, too.”
August looked at him. Jeremy pretended not to notice.
“Yup! He hit his head walking on the ledge of a concrete bridge that went over a creek. Thought the man died. Well, he wasn’t a man then. Or else he wouldn’t have been walking ledges all that much.”
“How did you help?” August asked.
“I didn’t know what to do. And I was scared. So I ran back to get help from the adults. By the time we returned, Hosea was trying to walk himself to us.”
Hosea was reserved when it came to his personal life before working for Rosslyn. He told the boy some affairs were none of his business and that no one liked a know-it-all. Hosea told him enough about why the rest of America was so different from his camp in Texas. He felt he prepared the boy for that reality when traveling from Nacogdoches to Raleigh. Of course, August showed modest concern for Hosea’s hearing and inquired as much about his unusually colored eyes. But, Hosea kept most things close to his chest. He felt he had been judged enough. And if there was a God, as August proposed, then he would leave it to the man upstairs to recite the pages of his wrong-doings. He felt he sinned enough for an entire city and anticipated redemption to lurk around the nearest corner.
August stopped and quietly turned to see how the short mountains loomed over his new world, flocks of birds accomplishing formations along the backdrop of the glittering sky. Delicate clouds appeared as halos above the heads of mountains, and they implied to be a manifestation of the masses’ thoughts.
“Misfortunes come in pairs,” August said, in broken Polish, when he looked down the snaking road, with an obvious house before the curve that disappeared behind the healthy green.
“What’s that?” Jeremy sought clarification.
“This is what Aleksander said to me when he lost someone close to him. He says that I should expect bad to come with a brother.”
Jeremy carefully considered the boy’s words, but embarrassingly felt he hadn’t understood the wisdom of the proverb.
The road ahead was split in half by two hardly visible lines running down its center. They were only apparent when the dirt and leaves were pushed aside where the overgrowth hadn’t cracked through. The grass along the road would be unkept if it weren’t for the wild cows and their peers grazing the land. That’s one thing August loved about nature: it takes care of itself. He looked to the sky and considered how far away the nearest bird was.
“Jeremy,” August said. “How can you tell if someone’s loyal?”
Jeremy thought for a second and walked with his front half heavily leaning over his feet. The hand truck he pulled hadn’t been used in many years, but it moved well. They oiled the wheels and it got to rolling quickly. However, a wheel was loose enough to rattle off an unending clang. Before, Jeremy spoke over the noise between strained breaths, but as he slowed his pace and gathered his air, he settled on a response: “I’ve never approached anyone on this side of the wall with much certainty.”
Two chickens clucked and complacently plucked at corn and grain like during the former golden days. Back when temperatures evenly rode a singular road that guided outdoor thermometers toward seventy-eight. August was only thirteen and a quarter when the weather was seeking order, and Fahrenheit was how he measured it. Watching the red stick point to the falling end of an arch to show him an example of thoroughly metric, August hoped Hosea’s put-together Jeep, with pieces fitting unusually, didn’t find the curves to be anything to mess with.
When August and Jeremy safely returned to the house they claimed, August gave up on convincing Hosea to remain. The man’s mind was made. The boy’s survival became his own responsibility. His recent success was all the proof he needed to convince himself he had it in him to fight for stability. Hosea had been caught off guard when Jeremy and August returned with the hand truck stacked full of supplies, along with words like “too much to carry” squeezing the air from his chest. This made him feel better about leaving the boy for a short while. Driving that winding road at a neutral pace to retrieve what the two couldn’t on their own, permitted Hosea to discern the remainder of the reward of their scavenging, which came in the form of an allowance of some quiet time to conjure briefs of immediate concerns; the matters were akin to abandonment, which felt like an ongoing hidden affair throughout Hosea’s life. Nevertheless, he would help them start their garden by pinching the seeds of soon-to-be seedlings, and planting them into soft soil with the hands of a timid man. As if a softer man, he would need to channel a soul with more consideration.
He would need to treat the land like a child of his own or a partner nurtured to health by his efforts alone. He would need compassion to make it work. He would recruit the boy for that part. The man preferred avoidance over discretion, isolation over companions, and basil over thyme. But he agreed with good when it showed up green—the color of olive. Falling in love would be a mistake there, so he never appreciated the color the way it deserved. But, he must have respected it if he wanted anything to grow in his favor. Jeremy was good with this, too. Jeremy liked to cook. Jeremy was a simple man, but not overrun with incompetence. He simply wanted to be happy. His peace of mind demanded appreciation.
Returning to the little house after a successful second hauling, Jeremy cracked an egg over a pile of quinoa flour August swore Jeremy invented after harvesting a plant from a wild-growing garden where nature met five acres of an abandoned farm some miles away. He then sprinkled a pinch of salt over the egg and folded the quinoa flour over itself. August watched his palms press against the counter starting from the elbow down to his wrist.
“We’ll have to let it rise after this—I’m sure—for at least a few hours,” Jeremy told him.
The house could have used more windows, and though the day was brighter than necessary that late afternoon, the men and the boy lit lanterns to even the lighting. A grey noise tinted the yellow walls blue, but the hot lanterns softly opened up like young flowers. Buds of light like sunshine, and not light like the weight of a petal, colored the corners of the walls and the kitchen tiles. Through the shine, Gareth smoked on the couch, his boots kicked up as he leaned back and watched the road snake away from the front yard and toward a montage of troubles unseen or unrecognized through the open door. Troubles are known to make a home in and around you—incognito but popping up like ghosts in hopes of casting a spurt of unfriendly reminders provoked by terrible pasts.
Outside, Hosea pushed another seed into the garden bed, then broke off a piece of his mind and let it flutter to the kitchen like a brain-shaped bundle of butterflies, where August and Jeremy worked. His imagination aligned with their reality for the most part. The bread was rising and eggs and roots were cooked until squishy. Jeremy finally sang just for August to laugh. He continued to sing anyway. He only had a few songs in him. That much could be heard through the open window. August set out plates in front of Gareth who must have been put on mute because he didn’t care to speak much. And when he did, it wasn’t very loud.
Eventually, when noon came, which only lasted a split second when they would look back on it in their memory, they ate, and Jeremy and August laughed at an inside joke they shared about Hosea. Gareth finished his plate of food, thanked them for its preparation, and announced he would watch the road to ensure no marauders followed them after arriving that morning before the sun appeared. Hosea went back to gardening with the help of Jeremy, and August got the urge to pray for the food that would nourish his body and overwhelm his mind with recollections of sewn memories and encroaching future events.
14 The day Hosea left August behind came quicker than August expected. With them happening upon the resources to start a proper garden, he hoped Hosea would reconsider the extent of his stay. A few more weeks to help prepare for their long-term solitude would suffice. But his Jeep was packed and fueled. He could almost hear the truck beg to get moving, its wheels tense with an anticipation of rolling their way north. Up north, the sun must have been easier to admire when the trees gave way to a delicate sky. If the day were overcast, the clouds would be thin but fit with strong puffs at one end as if mocking the ways of the water. But before that, Hosea and August needed to find common ground.
When Hosea looked at August, it became the boy’s opinion that Hosea didn’t truly care about him. He’d be willing to concur if the man took to admitting to no prior significant experience with sympathy; at least, then, he could ignore the truth that lived so blatant and cool without much effort. But thoughts such as that only acted to comfort August during moments when Hosea placed a priority on himself rather than on others, which came about often. As the eyes are the windows to the soul, Hosea’s brick stare pierced August’s spirit to pose a question of his morality. The two sat in the driver and passenger seat of the four-door Jeep with a bowl of berries and strips of baked dough, pelted with fresh water and charred by an open fire.
“I wish I could better explain myself and my situation,” Hosea told August.
August crunched on a failed attempt. Hosea side-eyed the boy and waited for a rebuttal. Hosea hadn’t needed to make a point or take a position—the subtext was painfully within reach. He took a berry from the bowl in August’s lap and placed it softly on his tongue, chewing it for ten seconds.
“I get why you’re upset with me, though. You’re not the first, as if I need to tell you. First was my mother. She also had a point to prove—that she was strong and could handle raising a boy on her own. Unfortunately for her, I took after my father; fortunately for her, she didn’t have to deal much with the both of us at the same time. I, for one, think a man must raise a child the proper way when he espouses one. That goes for non-kin, too. I’m not one to step out, I don’t think. I at least got that from my father. But when you’re a man—especially if you’re devoted to caring for someone—your personal story transforms completely. It’s no longer about you. All of a sudden it’s about those you cherish. These are the things that make a man’s life whole, and the very same things that may end it.”
Dark skies were impending, but sunsets never took a day off. Consider this: sunsets are sunrises in reverse. And, of course, August noted the differences from his bedroom window in his camp back in Texas, as the boy was a fastidious one. Still, his mind was capable of suspending disbelief. What he loved about sunsets differed from his passion for sunrises. Sunsets left the sky the color of Darwin pea flower, sweetened by rows of cotton-like clouds that valleyed toward the land infested with temperamental masses on the hump of the Earth, deciding between showing up as lungworms or whale lice.
“I want you to know—that is what I’m doing. I’m cherishing you. You’re smart enough to know how this moment works. There are steps to be taken, and step one is getting over this dependency. When I say ‘I promise I’ll be back,’” Hosea took in the air. “I mean it.”
And so it went—the apology and the awkward silence, the final speech to the group, and the three who remained watching Hosea’s Jeep rock away were all so predictable. The walk to the lake August took, during which he grappled with the bed near the water with bare feet as the sun set—his toes tickled by soft blades until he was all but forced to stop moving, was all so predictable. The absence of strongly scented breezes, which smelled like fire and sweet wood, and the minutes of the hours taking twice as long to turn over like the final moments before a new year, were all so predictable. Together with the mesmerizing backdrop of a well-lit North Carolina twilight, the Tangelo horizon carving through the woods behind the lake; the lonely flight of a hawk pricking the sky, its red shoulders flexing during a bold ascent; or the list of chores running through the boys head as he walked back to the little house from the lake, which was a shockingly long list that was directly related to the world ending, August jumped with widened eyes at the pop of a gun going off from what sounded like only meters away, which disabled him with confusion.