How Will They Remember You?
Rachel shook her head. “It just reminds us of what we lost,” she said.
He stared at her ring a little longer and then understood. “You re-married,” he said.
She let the silence speak on her behalf.
Alcide’s chest sunk, and his head began to swim in disbelief. “I can forgive you for that,” he said without really hearing himself.
Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “I don’t need your forgiveness,” she said. She softened her words then and said, “I thought you were dead.”
“I might as well have been.”
Rachel sat quiet for a moment, then said, “You came back alone.”
“I did,” he said. He dragged his ragged fingernails across the unfinished wood of the kitchen table. Behind him, a metal pot began to boil on the wood-burning stove, sizzling and whistling through the silence.
*
Though they had survived the ambush, Alcide and Joaquin, along with a quarter of their company, had been taken to a prison camp somewhere north of Tennessee. Every day, as they had marched north through the hills, a new batch of men had died from exhaustion or illness or cruelty. They considered the dead to be lucky. The men had lived their entire lives at sea level and found their blood too thin and their lungs too weak for the mountainous terrain. Alcide watched his son’s once-sturdy legs shrivel and his shoulders become small and fragile like a child’s. He could feel his bones rising to the surface of his skin, now stretched thin across his frame.
“We’re going to escape here,” one of the young men said one night. The sparse fires dotted the grounds of the prison camp where Alcide and Joaquin sat huddled in a hushed meeting of gaunt men, each one thinner than the last.
Alcide listened to the young men lay out the details for their escape, each one more juvenile and stupid than the last. As the firelight flickered, Alcide could see his son Joaquin becoming entranced with the possibility of freedom and victory, that same fire of violence rekindled behind his eyes.
Out of their small collection, twenty men had conspired to overrun the night-shift guards and climb the wooden walls and disappear into the grey night.
“I don’t want you to go,” Alcide told his son the night before their planned escape.
“We can’t stay here.”
“You can’t take the guards,” Alcide said.
“Is this how you want to be remembered?” Joaquin asked his father. “As a prisoner?”
For a moment, Alcide imagined asking his own father that same question. But in his imagination, his father, loading his rifle with precision and poise, said nothing.
Alcide said to his son, “I want to be remembered for keeping you safe.”
Father and son lay together as the rain loosened the ground beneath their tent, the new mud cooling their backs in the night.
*
Rachel pulled the boiling pot from the stove and set it between them to cool. Then she said, “They said your company got hauled up north.”
“We got ambushed. Took us prisoner,” he said.