50 Years Later

Time was a strange thing.

When you weren’t watching it, it passed in the blink of an eye. Time used to drag for Andrew when he wandered the West from place to place. But after he settled down, things changed. Time stopped mattering to him as much as it used to.

Today was no different.

The train whistle carried clearly across Utugi in the cool morning, a sound that still struck Andrew as strange after all these years, though his grandsons had grown up thinking of it as ordinary as birdsong.

“Slower,” Andrew said, one hand on each boy’s shoulder, his legs no longer quite what they’d been even a decade back. “Your grandfather’s not as young as he used to pretend he was.”

The two looked at him, shaking their heads in disbelief. They would never believe their grandfather wasn’t as strong as their parents and the townspeople always made him out to be.

They slowed without complaint, walking him the last stretch toward the five markers at the edge of town, weathered now with fifty years of prairie weather, the names on some of them worn soft enough that only Andrew’s fingers, tracing them from memory, could still be certain what they said.

“Sit with me a while,” he told the boys, and lowered himself onto the bench built there some fifteen years back, when his knees had first started arguing with him about kneeling in the grass.

“But—”

Andrew was already sitting down before the younger one could say anything more. The boy pouted, but he seemed to realize Andrew wasn’t going to budge. His knees hurt, and this bench was where he was going to stay.

The older of the two boys, twelve now and already taller than his mother, sat on the grass at Andrew’s feet without being asked. The younger one lingered a moment longer at the edge of the markers, tracing one name with his finger the way his grandfather always did, as though he’d learned the gesture before he’d learned what it meant.

“That one’s Waya,” the boy said. “You told us he was the bravest man you ever knew.”

“I did say that.” Andrew let his eyes travel the row: Waya, Inola, Applewhite, and beyond them the two oldest markers, worn nearly to nothing now, his mother and father together again, at least in name, in ground that had never once cared what either of them had been born as. “It’s still true.”

Beyond the fence line, past the new grain depot and the schoolhouse that had replaced the schoolhouse that had replaced the first one, Utugi kept doing what towns did, growing in directions Andrew had never planned for and couldn’t always follow anymore.

New families arrived on nearly every train now, some of them Cherokee, some of them not, and the town had long since stopped asking too many questions about which was which. Andrew still marveled at that some mornings: that the world he’d built here had managed to become, in its own small and imperfect way, exactly the kind of place his father had once told him didn’t exist.

So much had changed that sometimes Andrew could hardly believe it. His father wouldn’t have lived to see this, but Andrew wished he could have seen even the beginning of it. Andrew would have to carry it for both of them until they met again.

He watched the town a moment longer, then closed his eyes against the morning sun and let his grandsons sit with him in the quiet a while before either of them thought to ask him, again, to tell the story from the beginning.

“You’re going to ask me for the story.” Andrew didn’t open his eyes.

“We weren’t going to ask.”

“You were thinking it loud enough to hear,” Andrew said with a chuckle. “The two of you always think loud enough for the whole town to hear.”

The older boy grinned up at him from the grass. “Just the part about Waya, then. The part where he came back for you. That’s our favorite.”

Andrew’s right hand had drifted to his thigh, rubbing at the old ache there the way it did most mornings now. The older boy noticed. He always noticed.

He was far more mature than he needed to be. Andrew suspected he would be a leader one day, the kind who took charge. And unlike Andrew in his youth, he wouldn’t run. He would lead, and proudly.

“Is it bad today?”

“No worse than yesterday. No better, either.” Andrew flexed his fingers, two of which never quite straightened anymore. “That’s what happens when you spend your young years being thrown off things and shot at. Your bones keep the receipts.”

Andrew was grateful he could still get around. At his age, one wrong fall could end things, but he was lucky enough to make this walk every year. The day he couldn’t would be a sad day indeed.

“Mama says you should’ve stayed in bed this morning.”

Andrew had to laugh. It was good advice, but not advice he was going to take. Not today. Today mattered too much. His daughter knew the stories, but she couldn’t know what this day meant to him, not really, when he was the one who had lived it.

“Your mama says a great many things. Most of them right. But I come here on this day every year, and I’m not going to stop because my knees have opinions.”

That was likely why she had sent her boys along with him. He could picture his daughter in the kitchen, telling the eldest especially to keep an eye on his grandfather. When had it come to that, them keeping an eye on him?

The younger boy came and sat on the end of the bench, careful not to jostle him. “Why this day?”

“Because this is the day Waya died.” A long pause. “I picked this spot so he could watch the trains come in. He never got to see one.”

“Did he ever make peace? With all of it?”

“Some. Enough.” A faint smile. “He used to say peace was like mending a fence. You never finish. You keep walking the line.”

“And Applewhite? You never tell much about him.”

“No, I don’t.” Andrew’s voice softened. “Applewhite was a white man who owed us nothing and gave us everything he had anyway. Early on, some people in this town didn’t want his marker here. Said the ground ought to be for our own.”

Even after fifty years, speaking of them was hard. Andrew didn’t think he had ever recovered from losing all three in so short a time. He carried the grief even now. He knew it wasn’t his fault. He had played a part in it, but some things had been out of his control.

“What did you tell them?”

“That he was our own. And that anybody who disagreed could come argue with me about it.” He chuckled, then coughed, and both boys leaned in at once. He waved them off. “Nobody came.”

The younger boy looked at the two oldest markers. “Were you scared? When your father died?”

A train sounded again, farther off this time, heading east.

“I was scared for a long time before that. Scared I’d never be enough like him. Scared I’d be too much like him. Then one day I looked around at this place, at all these people who’d come because they heard there was somewhere they could just be, and I thought, well. Maybe this is what enough looks like.”

The older boy pulled at a blade of grass. “Do you think they’d like it? What the town is now?”

Andrew looked out past the fence line, at the depot and the schoolhouse and the smoke rising from a dozen chimneys.

“I think they’d complain about how loud it’s gotten. And then they’d stay.”

They would always stay.

Inola and Waya would have followed him anywhere, and they had. He wished they could see how much had changed, but all he could do was keep living every day and think of them when he could.

He reached out, and without a word, each boy took one of his hands.

“Help me up. Then I’ll tell it from the beginning.”

The boys pulled him to his feet between them, and his knees complained the whole way up.

“Give me a minute first,” he said. “Go on ahead. I’ll catch up.”

They wandered off toward the fence line, and Andrew turned back to the markers. He told them, the way he did every year, what they had missed. They would have loved Adsila. They would have loved the two children she gave him, and the four grandchildren after that.

When the boys came back for him, he was ready.

“Now,” he said. “Have you two heard the story of how I built this town?”

The younger one groaned. “Grandpa, we’ve heard that—”

He was cut off by his brother’s elbow in his ribs.

“Ow!” He glared at his brother. “I mean, tell us, Grandpa. Please.”

Andrew chuckled. “Subtle, boys. But if you insist.”

He decided to start further back than they were used to. Not with the town, but with his mother, and how he had come into this world.

“Before there was a town, before the fort, before any of it, there was a soldier who got himself lost.”

The younger boy frowned. “Your pa?”

“My pa. Separated from his column out past the river, with no water and a fever coming on. He’d have died out there if a Cherokee woman hadn’t found him lying in the grass.”

“Your mother,” the older boy said quietly.

It no longer hurt to think of his mother. When he did, he smiled, grateful for the short time he’d had with her.

“My mother.” Andrew let the word sit a moment. He didn’t say it often anymore. “She could have kept walking. Most folks would have. Instead, she dragged a white man twice her size back to her people and sat up three nights cooling his head.”

“Why?”

“I asked my father that once. He said she told him a person in need isn’t a white man or a Cherokee man. He’s just a person in need.” Andrew smiled. “Took me most of my life to understand what she meant. Your grandmother says I still haven’t.”

They walked on slowly, the boys matching their steps to his. Behind them, the train whistle sounded once more, and the town went on about its business, louder than any of them would have liked and exactly as it should be.

Andrew thought of the pantry, the rain, the fire. Of Inola’s arrow and Waya’s hatchet, and Applewhite riding in when he had nothing left to give. He thought of Adsila at the stove this morning, telling him not to stay out too long in the cold, knowing full well he would.

Strangers, most of them, once. And every one of them had stopped for someone anyway.

It was far from the life he had ever imagined. He’d never expected to make it to forty, let alone become an elder in the community. The only thing he would change, if he could, was to have the ones he’d lost back, even for a moment.

“Is that the end?” the younger boy asked.

Andrew squeezed his small hand.

“No,” he said. “That’s where it starts.”

THE END