Chapter 10 - The Unbroken Ridge
They buried him at the top of the orchard, under the biggest white oak on the ridge—a tree that had stood there when the French traders were still pulling canoes through the reeds of the Illinois River.
There was no stone. They didn't need a piece of marble with dates and names carved into it by a stranger.
Marcus brought three heavy flat slabs of limestone up from the creekbed, laying them over the earth so the winter frosts wouldn't shift the soil, and Gidley planted a small cedar sapling at the head—a wild shoot he’d pulled from the limestone bluffs near the river.
By noon, the sun was high and warm, burning off the last of the autumn mist from the valley floor.
Marcus stood by the oak, his spade resting against his shoulder, his hands clean of earth.
Gidley sat on a flat stone nearby, his good leg stretched out, his wooden peg resting in the dry grass, filling his pipe with sweet Virginia leaf.
Carrie stayed by the limestone slabs.
She didn't carry her whistle anymore. She had buried it deep under the second limestone slab, tucked into the quiet earth right beside Raleigh’s broad shoulder, where the cedar wood could rot down into the dark soil and become part of the oak roots that fed the high ridge.
"Is he gone, Carrie?" Marcus asked softly, looking out over the red-and-gold canopy of the orchard toward the distant turnpike.
Carrie stood up.
She didn't look down at the ground. She turned her face to the south, where the warm wind was coming up through the valley, bringing the scent of ripe apples, dry oak leaves, and the clear, cold water of the creek.
She smiled—a small, complete smile that filled her pale face with light.
"No," she said, her voice carrying through the quiet orchard like the note of a wood-thrush at dawn. "He’s just standing at the gate, Marcus."
"Which gate?" her brother asked gently.
May you like
"The one without the lock," Carrie said.
She reached out and took her brother’s hand in her right hand, and Gidley’s knotty fingers in her left, and together they walked back down through the rows of heavy-laden trees toward the house—the three of them moving together in the quiet sunlight, while high above them, in the gold leaves of the old oak, the autumn wind sang a song that had no iron in it at all.
