the planet and everything to do with people giving their money to green programs so that desalinization plants could be built for the rich people to survive the coming shortage. It got so bad with him talking about the freshwater shortage that people started avoiding him out of just plain annoyance along with the fear. Nobody took him serious until the Aswan Dam was blown up.”
“Mother told me about that.”
“It was a big deal,” Stebbs said. “That dam had always been a political problem for Egypt, but the rest of the world was always told it was about power, not water. Well, when the guerrilla group over there took it down, a lot of people over here sat up and took notice. Your daddy finally had an audience.
“He took a group of us up to the lake, Lake Erie, you know?” Lynn nodded. “He took us up there to show us this plant that had been built brand new on the Canadian side to clean up the lake water. We rowed out in a boat, pretending to be fishing, and he pointed out there was armed guards all along that plant’s walls, and ‘what was a water purification plant doing with a private army holding M16s?’ he asked me.
“It was a good enough question, I thought, so once we came home, we started taking him serious. By then he’d knocked your mom up—uh, I mean, Lauren was pregnant with you, and the two of them weren’t getting on so well. She needed help at home, but he was all in love with the fact that he had men to lead. He kept saying that the regular army was too busy overseas, and when the time came it was up to militia like us to defend what was ours. Or, in the case of the lake, keep what he felt was Ohio’s away from Canada.
“In any case, as it turns out, the crazier he sounded, the closer to the truth he was. One morning, our taps had all been turned off, and we was told if we wanted water we’d have to go into town to buy it. Now, buying water was no new thing—we’d always had to pay for our water, unless you were lucky enough to have a well. But now the water companies was saying they couldn’t afford the upkeep of the water lines, and if you wanted it, you’d have to come and get it.
“That’s how the Shortage came to be, and it went from there. At first, you had to go into the nearest town with a utility office to get your water. Then pretty soon they said it was too much of a bother to keep those open. So if you wanted your water you had to come to the city to get it, and eventually they just said if you wanted water, you had to live in the city. People started leaving, piling into their cars and going to the city limits to pile on top of each other there. Those of us out here with wells or access to water stayed, and there were bad enough stories coming out of the cities after that to make us glad we did.”
“Like what?”
“The cholera, for one,” Stebbs said. “Pack all those people together, you’re bound to have sicknesses of some kind passing around. They forced a bunch of sick people out of the cities, I heard, but nothing can stop a burn like that once it gets going. Wasn’t just the cholera either. Every now and then, people would pass through here that your mother didn’t shoot and I’d learn a thing or two. Made it sound like the Black Death had come back again, nearly. But out here, with less people, the illnesses weren’t the worst. Out here we mostly just managed be threats to each other.
“Not long after they drove the sick from the cities, your daddy and I, we had a falling-out. I tried to stop him from taking the men up to the lake to take that water plant by force. He said it’d be a proper war, fought by the militia like the first one in our country was. Enough of the men were on his side that I backed down. He had everybody eating out of his hand by then, and I wasn’t half certain that he didn’t have it in for me, seeing as he was always looking over his shoulder and wondering who was causing problems in his little kingdom. So I cut my losses, decided to set up on a little piece of land I owned that had a decent vein of water running under it.”
“Across the field,” Lynn said.
“That’s the place.”
“You just happened to be able to keep an eye on Mother from there?”
Stebbs shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, here’s the part I’m not so proud of, kiddo. Your dad, he said good-bye to your mom, even though her belly was as big as the world with you inside, and he took a bunch of the men up north to the lake, armed to the teeth. Not a one of ’em came back. Not long after I got set up, your mom came walking across that field, gun in one hand, your tiny body in the crook of the other elbow. She said she didn’t much see the point in me living in a shack when she had a whole house to offer, and two guns was better than one anyway.
“I could tell she had thought a lot about what she was going to say ahead of time, and made it all come out right so that it sounded like it would be the best thing for both of us, and not like she was asking for my help. I took one look at you, with your eyes so big they filled up most of your face, and your little bare feet so small it looked like they’d fall right through a crack in the ground and I told her I didn’t need no more work than I already had, and that responsibility for one was all I had left in me. Your mom, she walked away without asking twice, and I didn’t talk to her again until I stuck my foot in a trap.”
Stebbs swirled the now-cold coffee in his cup and threw the dregs in the fire, where they sputtered into steam. “I turned my back on her same as her family had done, and the same as your daddy did once there was work involved along with the play. Your mother raised you right, but she raised you hard, and I can’t help but think if I’d been around maybe you’d have some softer edges. Maybe you could’ve actually had a life, and not just
Lynn snapped the stock back onto her rife. “Nope, I don’t.”
“So that’s why I give it elsewhere, I guess. Making amends.”
“I remember you being here, after your foot,” Lynn said. “I think I might’ve liked it, if you’d stayed.”
“I think I might’ve liked that too,” Stebbs said quietly. “I tried, Lynn. I promise you I tried after I got hurt. I wanted that woman to see sense so bad . . .” He trailed off, lost in memories made in the very room he was sitting in.
“So why not?” Lynn asked, her voice small. “Why couldn’t it happen?”
“She wouldn’t have me. It’d taken more out of her than I could’ve known to ask the first time, and when I shot her down I think it killed everything that was left in her but pride in herself and love for you. She wasn’t always a hard woman, you know. It’s what she became. You told me once not to speak of her unless you asked —”
“And I’m asking,” Lynn said.
“So I guess I’ll go ahead and tell you—don’t be making the same mistakes she did. Or hell, the ones I did either. Don’t be afraid to care for that little one, and don’t be too proud to let that boy know what you feel. Otherwise you might end up with neither of ’em.”
Lynn propped her rifle in the corner and tossed her own coffee onto the coals. “Seeing how it’s pretty late now, you might as well stay here, I guess.”
“That’s all you got to say after that?”
Lynn gave her rifle a last rubdown with a cloth, hands moving slowly while she thought out her sentence. “I don’t know that there’s anything to say. I can’t change it if some of Father’s wrongness found its way into me, and I can’t change the way Mother raised me.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to be more than they were. Be strong, and be good. Be loved, and be thankful for it. No regrets.”
Lynn sat quietly for a moment, watching the firelight flicker on her oiled rifle barrel.
Stebbs watched her carefully. “That’s not you talking, I take it?”
“No, that’s Robert Service. Mother always said the winters are long, but poetry anthologies are longer.”
Stebbs shot a glance at the bookshelf, where some of the spines were thicker than his hand. “Ain’t that the truth. Your mother had something else she said—‘It is what it is.’”
A smile spread across Lynn’s face at the words, dissipating the sadness. “That’s familiar, all right.”
“You know well enough what it means, then?”
“Mother always said it when something happened that couldn’t be undone, like when I lost that bucket in the pond, or broke a canning jar. Means you can’t change it.”
“Like the past. You can’t change the things you’ve done. It’s now and the here on out you’ve got control of.”
