Page 25 of The Jackal

I felt his arms come around my back, still strong, stronger than an older man's had any right to be. I put my face down against his shoulder the way I hadn't done since I was small, and I wept. I'm not ashamed of it. I've stood dry-eyed over more dead men than I could number and felt my pulse never move. I held my father in a war room on a harbor and I came apart. No part of me wanted to hold it back.

And the boy I'd been remembered.

It came up whole, the way the worst and best things do, no distance in it at all.

We were kids on the ranch, my brothers and me, a pack of us running wild through a long Texas evening with the light gone gold and low. Hide and seek. I was the one brave enough to range out past where we were allowed, because I'd always been the one who went too far, the one who wanted to find the place nobody else would think to look.

There was old mine country at the back of the property, played out and fenced off and forbidden, which to a boy is just another word for interesting. I found a shaft the brush had grown over. I thought it would make the finest hiding place in the history of the game. I leaned out over the dark to see how deep it went.

The ground gave.

I don't remember the fall. The mind is kind about some things. What I remember is the after—the cold, and a dark so total it had weight to it, and the far-off understanding that I was hurt past what a body comes back from. I was a long way down. Nobody could hear me. I was a small, broken thing at the bottom of the earth. I was alone, and I was a child, and I should have been screaming.

I wasn't.

Because the dark wasn't empty. That's the thing I've never been able to make a living person understand, and the thing that made me what I am. Down there at the bottom, where there should have been nothing but cold and fear and the slow going-out of a hurt boy's light, there was something else.

The dark opened.

I don't have the words—I told you once they were never invented, and I meant it—but it opened, and there was a country on the other side of it, and it was not terrible. It was the opposite of terrible. It was warm and it was wide and it knew my name. It wanted me, and the part of me that was a frightened, broken child simply stopped being frightened. I started to go toward it. I wanted to. God, help me, I have wanted to go back every day since.

And then, a light came.

It came down through that country on the other side first—I want to be precise about the order of it, because the order is everything—a light I understood, the way you understand things over there, to be a person. A spirit. Somebody had come for me. The light had a shape, and the shape leaned down over me. I knew, the way the place let you know things, that I was found. That I was safe. That somebody had come all the way down into the earth after me and was not going to leave me in it.

Then, the country went thin, and the light became a flashlight, and the spirit became a face.

My father's face.

He'd gone down into a played-out mine shaft after a boy half the county would have given up for dead—on a fraying rope, in the dark—and he'd found me at the bottom. The first thing I saw coming back across that line into the world of the living was him. His face out of the light. His voice saying my name like a rope thrown down. Then, his arms, those same strong arms, gathering up everything broken of me and holding it together against his chest while other men hauled us both up into the last of the gold evening.

I came back. The doctors couldn't explain it and quit trying. But the boy who came up out of that ground was not the boy who'd gone down. Everyone could see it. Only my father seemed to understand why.

From that day until the day he left us, my father treated me like a man.

Not like the others. He loved my brothers fierce and full, but with them he was a father—a hand on the neck, an order, a lesson taught hard.

With me, he was something quieter. He spoke to me the way you speak to a person who's seen a thing you both know about and neither of you will say aloud.

He never once asked me what happened down there. Never made me tell it. But I'd catch him watching me sometimes with a look I couldn't name as a boy and can name now. Recognition. He knew. I never told him about the country on the other side, never found the words for it as a child, and somehow he knew, anyway—knew exactly what his son had seen at the bottom of the earth and carried back up out of it. Like he'd known before I ever fell. Like it was a thing he'd been waiting on.

So, when I told him, just now, that I knew he wasn't dead—I hadn't lied.

I'd known. The world told me he was gone, years back. The world was wrong, and I was the one man alive built to know it was wrong. I find the dead. I feel them. It's the whole of what I am.

And in all the years they'd had my father buried, I had never once felt him among them. There was a Byron-shaped silence where the grief should have been. I'd learned long ago to trust those silences over any headstone. My father was not with the dead. I knew it the way I know my own hands.

I never told my brothers. They already thought me strange enough—loved me, every one of them, and kept their half-step back. What was I going to say? That I could feel our father still walked the earth, the way I can feel a body two rooms over? They'd have looked at me the way the living always look at me. So, I held it alone, the way I hold most things, and I waited, without knowing I was waiting, for a black jet and a city in the rain.

"I missed you," my father said against my shoulder, and his voice broke on it. "God, forgive me, son. I missed you every single day."

And the strangest thing happened, the thing that told me how far the world had turned. The arms that had carried me up out of the earth were shaking now. It had become my turn to be the strong one. I felt it all coming off him in waves—the sorrow, the longing, the great freight of regret a man hauls when he's been kept from his own blood too long. I held him through it the way I've held a hundred grieving people. Except this was my father, and I was the steady one now.

"It's okay, Dad," I said. "It's okay. I've got you."

I meant it.

Here's the thing about me my brothers will never fully understand, the gift the country on the other side handed back along with the rest. I'm built to forgive. Not because I'm good—I've done too much to call myself good—but because I have never once believed the world was anything other than exactly what it was supposed to be.