Chapter Text
…
1895
Rey walks down from the chicken coop into the farmhouse through its unlocked back door to find a dead man standing in her pantry; he has unsealed a jar of spiced peaches and is eating them off the blade of a fighting knife with a polished red abalone handle. He does not turn to notice her.
She goes out again, her skirts still tucked up into her muddied boot-tops, and returns perhaps thirty seconds later holding Luke’s old carbine rifle. It is a .52 caliber Lightside Repeater and the noise its lever-action makes when she pumps a round into the chamber is as loud as the snap of a burning pine knot.
The man stops.
He glances over his left shoulder at her. He has heavy black hair brushed to curl against his collar and the heels of his brogan shoes have been worn down to almost nothing along their outside edges, suggesting a slightly turn-toed walk. All the photographs Rey has ever seen of him – all two – have depicted him seated, either in a rocking chair or on the farmhouse front steps, and thus his height comes as something of a surprise. His head is almost level with the pantry door frame.
“Now, listen.” Rey pulls back the carbine’s hammer until it locks. “We can do this two different ways, except one way will make a mess of the kitchen and the other way won’t. Which do you prefer?”
“I have no idea.” The man eats a final peach before replacing the jar on its shelf and stepping out backwards from the pantry. “How good is your aim?”
“Good enough.” Rey braces her shoulder against the wall in anticipation of the carbine’s vicious kick and supposes it serves her right, relying upon the guardian services of a sheepdog who has gone half-deaf with age; she resolves to give Chewie a piece of her mind as soon as this jugglery business is resolved. “Who are you?”
The man slicks the knife clean against his trouser leg. His coat hangs sharply off his gaunt shoulders as though meant to fit a heavier man, or as though he himself was at one time a heavier man than he now appears. He turns the rest of the way towards her and there is a livid red scar that splits the length of his face into two unequal pieces.
“I’ve come to speak with Reverend Skywalker,” he says. “And who are you, his cook?”
“Because if I didn’t know any better,” Rey feels an angry blood flame up in her cheeks, “I’d say you were his nephew, except everybody knows he’s been dead for ten years.”
It is closer to eight years, really, or maybe seven, but ten sounds better and makes Rey think of that old poem the sisters at Tuanul Orphanage once told her about, the story of the faithful wife who waited so long at her loom. Rey is not entirely sure if Luke’s dead nephew was properly named Ben or Benjamin, either, since she had received the story in bits and pieces over months and across many years, and has therefore assembled it like a patchwork quilt with a patchwork quilt’s uneven edges. Every Sunday she leaves flowers at a plot of graves above the orchard and wonders each time about that peculiar surname, derived from the Latin word solus and denoting a piece of music that must be played without accompaniment. The flowers on the graves have progressed from snowdrops to daffodils to damask violets to blue chicory, from sunchoke to aster and goldenrod and the very last of autumn’s brilliant purple ironweed.
The man drops his knife into its sheath.
“That’s interesting news,” he says. “And how did I die, I’d like to know?”
Rey presses her lips against her teeth.
“Maybe a grizzly in Montana ate you. Maybe you were prospecting for gold in the Sierra Nevadas and got buried in an avalanche. Maybe you threw in your lot with a gang of murderers and were hanged by a judge in Fort Smith. Whatever the case,” she brings up the carbine, with some difficulty but not without dexterity, “you’re either an imposter or an apparition from the pits of hell, and I don’t tolerate company like that around here.”
The man hesitates. His mouth works in silence, the skin along his scar twitching where a nerve has been severed and his fingers still stippling the knife’s red handle. His black coat is tattered along its hem and several of its various holes bear a more than passing resemblance to the scattershot marks made by a coach-gun; Rey wonders how he came here, whether he has traveled west from Boston or north from Springfield or east across the state border from Albany. It seems a marvel that any conductor would admit him onto a train, dressed as he is, even with modern standards of decency being so deplorably low as they are.
They hold each other fixed in a standoff silence for about ten seconds more before the man’s hand slips away from his knife.
“That floorboard there, under your foot.” He gestures with his chin. He wears a black neckerchief that has dust stuck inside its rough creases. “Stamp on it.”
Rey blinks. The kitchen’s windows face southeast to let in the October noontime sunshine.
“What?”
“Stamp your foot.” His eyes are amber-yellow and remind her of a coyote’s, another detail necessarily omitted from those two old tintype photographs. “What do you hear?”
Rey lifts her heel to bring it down twice in a sort of flatfoot stomp. The action scatters caked mud off her boot and the sound it throws back is a hollow echo, like the thump inside a log. She has walked these floorboards ten thousand times — has lived in this farmhouse since she was thirteen years old — and has never given the noise a second thought.
“If you lift back that board,” the man says, “you’ll find a pack of playing cards — and a whiskey bottle with it, most likely.” His face seems to change briefly, in a shiver of the kitchen’s sunlight, but then nothing about the man’s face seems able to keep itself entirely still; his eyes and brows and mouth all move minutely, subtly, as though there are live wires running beneath them. “It’s the only place my father could keep it hidden from my mother.”
“We’ll see.” Rey lowers into a crouch. “Don’t move.”
Holding the rifle trained on him while nudging back the floorboard is something of trial, but Rey manages it; the board levers free with a spurt of dust and light touches on the dazzling umber of a whiskey bottle, swaddled in newspapers dated back to the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes and laid beside a deck of Italian-suited gambler’s cards with a white falcon printed onto their backs. Beneath them is a pair of dice covered in chipped gilt paint.
Rey stands.
“My name is Ben Solo,” the man says, “but you know that already, don’t you?”
Slowly, Rey lets the carbine fall, until the blued steel point of its bayonet rests balanced on the floor.
“I’m Rey.”
“Rey who?”
“Just Rey,” she says. “I was Reverend Skywalker’s ward.”
And then Ben Skywalker Organa-Solo, risen from the dead after these seven or eight or maybe ten years, turns his head at an angle and frowns.
“Where is he?”
...
She serves him a midday dinner of brown bread spread with butter and molasses, a hoop of hard cheese and some Dudley apples that have been gathered in a barrel. Chewie lollops in through the kitchen’s opened back door, snuffles around Ben’s shoes for a minute with his moss-wet nose, and in a clatter of elbows he curls himself untroubledly down around Ben’s chair and goes right back to sleep.
Rey turns away.
“I’m still surprised the news didn’t reach you.” She swings a kettle off the iron woodstove to pour him a cup of heated cider. “A reporter even came here from the New York Tribune to write about it. He said it’s not often that a living legend dies.”
“That reporter didn’t know much, then. There’s legends dying all the time these days.” Ben eats with a hunched stolidity, the fixed purpose and posture of a starving man; Rey knows the look well. “But it wouldn’t have mattered. I came here from up in the Alaska Territory — the only way news gets out there is if an angel of the lord delivers it personally.”
“What were you doing in Alaska?”
“Nothing that mattered.”
Rey pours herself a cup of cider and assumes the seat opposite his at the kitchen table.
In the short while it has taken her to prepare this small repast, she has also prepared a hundred possible answers to a hundred possible questions, of which Ben Skywalker Organa-Solo has not yet asked her a single one. Your uncle died on a rainy morning in March, she has prepared to tell him; it was sudden but it was easy; I found him in his chair and at first I thought he was asleep; I asked Reverend Dameron if he could give the sermon, even if Luke always considered Poe Dameron something of a cheeky rogue, and even if Luke disagreed with the Congregationalists on many key doctrinal points; I buried him at your mother’s right side, so that your father would remain at her left, although there was enough space between the two graves that I might’ve chosen otherwise; Luke never allowed me to lock the back kitchen door at night, on the chance that you should ever come home again at long, long last after it was dark and the rest of the world had pronounced you dead and there was nobody awake to let you in.
“So where’d he find you?”
Rey glances up. Ben Solo has ceased pitching food into his mouth and is regarding her from somewhere far behind those penetrative yellow eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“Luke.” Ben sops his slathered brown bread in the apple cider. “He always took a special interest in orphanage benefits. Which one did he collect you from?”
Another angry flush sweeps through Rey’s face and she grips her cup. It is made from blue-painted porcelain; there is a matching cup she keeps hidden on the high shelf.
“Tuanul Orphanage,” she says. “It’s in Boston. The Church runs it.”
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen. Luke brought me here seven years ago.”
He evaluates her. His jaw is long and his features all seem to sit balanced over the centering gravity of that dolorous, unrestful mouth.
“I see.”
Rey sets down her cup. “What precisely do you mean by that?”
“Whatever you think it means, I suppose.”
“For a guest, you’re not being terribly polite.”
Ben sets down his cup as well.
“And for a caretaker, you’re being terribly presumptuous. I’ve been called many things, but being referred to as a guest in my own house is a novelty.”
She is preparing to unload another volley of opinions on him, but this pronouncement brings Rey up short. She can distantly hear the chickens squallering in their coop on the hill, the sheep discussing politics in their pen and the horse Diomedes — called Dio — pacing his usual antic circles around the corral. Through the window Rey can see the arbor from which she has harvested seven summers’ worth of red Catawba grapes to make jellies and wine, can see the ice house into which she has hauled seven winters’ worth of blocks cut from the pond to pack in sawdust.
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mr. Solo.” She stands. “Luke passed the farm to me, when he died. It’s in the will.”
Ben’s face goes blank as though a helmet visor has been slammed over it.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Go down to the probate court and find out for yourself,” Rey says. “If that doesn’t persuade you, I’m friends with a local constable who’d be quite happy to come up here and arbitrate the dispute — Finn has always envied the Western sheriffs their lively times." She punctuates this by making a fist. "I’m sure he wouldn’t mind serving you a few good bunches of fives.”
Ben’s wide hands are gripped around his cup, showing the places where his knuckles are split and chapped, but he keeps firmly in his seat.
“Skywalker Farm is mine by right of blood.”
“It is mine by right of law.”
“My grandfather cleared this land and built this house.” His voice is tight through its center as though tethered by a short chain. “My grandmother planted the orchard. That stove you’re cooking on was a gift for my mother that my father brought here by wagon from New York City.”
“Yes, I can tell how very much it all mattered to you by the fact that you left it and didn’t come back for ten years.”
“You don’t know anything about me. I’d advise you not to speak as if you do.”
“And I will advise you in turn that I know my rights and know that I’m at full liberty to cast you from my house into the outer darkness if you insist on provoking me.”
“So you can keep the place all for your own, is that it? I’d like to see you manage it. Have you spent a winter on this farm by yourself yet?”
Rey would like to return an instantaneous parry, and tries hard to think of what her answer should be, but she hesitates too long and thus rewards him with his first victory.
Because she has felt it coming, of course: she has sensed it in the chilled air and seen it in the stiff frosts on the mown hay fields, has perceived it in the delaying sunrises and the advancing sunsets as darkness burns her days shorter at both ends. It is an hour’s ride to town in Exegol even on a clear summer afternoon and winter up here behind the mountains always comes on like a siege, like an embittering war of attrition, so that Rey has been stocking the root cellar and seasoning the firewood and laying those withering flowers on the graves with the knowledge that this time she will have to pass through it alone.
“What do you care?” she asks, finally. “Are you planning to offer yourself as my hired hand?”
“I will not work for the right to sleep in my own bed and eat at my own table, Miss Rey.”
And now it is his turn to hesitate too long, in delivering this riposte, and it is Rey’s turn to score a hit. She looks more closely at the bedraggled state of his coat, his ill-shaven cheeks and the spareness of his body inside its broad frame. This, she determines, ought to really fix his flint.
“You haven’t got anywhere else to go, have you?”
The scar twitches again where it comes near the wick of his mouth. Its ragged texture ages him, somewhat, but if Rey’s patchwork-quilt timeline is approximately correct then Ben Solo cannot be much older than thirty.
“You weren’t what I was expecting to find,” he says.
She scrapes away from her chair with a great deal of pomp and snatches up both his plate and his cutlery to deposit them in the kitchen’s dry stone sink.
“Well that’s just cold coffee for you, now, isn’t it?” She kicks at the woodstove’s damper to smother its coals and realizes her muddy skirts have been hitched up high enough so that they show the frilly pink rick-rack on the knees of her underdrawers, but then she figures a border ruffian like him is impervious to scandal and does not bother to cover herself. “Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s duties I’ve got to attend to. We can discuss your possible working arrangements again more civilly over supper.”
“I already told you, I won’t labor to keep my place in a house that already belongs to me.”
“You can rest easy on that score, Mr. Solo. You wouldn’t be staying in the house. There’s a bunk above the wagonshed that’ll do well enough for you, I believe. I just patched the roof in August.”
She has not been able to retrieve the cup from him, he has been clenching it so ferociously, but now Ben stands and turns and hurls the kitchen door shut behind him as he goes out; from the porch Rey can see him tramping off through the fields, his strides savage and his fists clenched. He’s probably got lice, she thinks, I ought to dump him in a carbolic bath, and then she notes for the first time that Ben Solo walks with a pained, leaden limp at one side. She notes as well that Chewie has gone ambling after him.
“Traitor,” she says. “Just see if I ever let you eat the scraps off my plate again.”
She levers water from an outside pump but sets the filled bucket down beside the dry sink while she goes upstairs. The white farmhouse with its green shutters is built generally in the style of a Greek revival, or so Rey understands it, but its roof follows a curious pattern of peaks and slants that make it hazardous to stand upright in certain places. There is a knitted blanket on the narrow slat-bed of her room and atop the dresser sits a sketchbook whose sheets have been sewn together with packing twine.
Rey sits at the end of her neatly-made bed, stays there ten minutes, then dries her face with her apron and goes downstairs again to finish the dishes.
...
She had glimpsed him first through the orphanage’s second-floor banister, pausing to rest from her daily chore of sweeping the stairs. She had seen only the top of his head, a blonde like wet sand streaked with a gray like the fog off Boston Harbor, until he had folded his arms behind his back and Rey saw in addition that the old man’s right hand was made from wood. The bristles on her broom had scratched the wall and the man turned his face up towards hers; there was a white clerical cravat with stiff preaching bands in his collar, except Rey did not recognize him as one of the priests who said their daily masses.
The sister he was speaking to had beckoned Rey down the stairs towards them. Beneath her starchy white habit Sister Lanai had a round, bulging face like a fish, a short squat body like a toad, but Rey had once gotten herself into a fight with a boy twice her size and Sister Lanai had lit after him brandishing a wash paddle; she had chased the boy clear down Hanover Street, clear to the Massachusetts State House, drubbing his ankles as she went and roaring oaths in what may have been Scottish Gaelic.
“And who’s this?” the old man with the false right hand had asked; maybe he lost it in a duel, Rey had been thinking. Maybe he was a cavalry officer and fought the rebels in the War Between the States.
“This young lady here is Remembrance,” Sister Lanai had answered, first. “Remembrance, this is Reverend Luke Skywalker. He was an old friend of Father Kenobi’s, longer ago than I care to admit.”
“My name’s Rey,” had been Rey’s prompt correction. “Just Rey.”
“We call her our Young Joan of Arc,” Sister Lanai laughed. “Whenever she makes a choice, she makes it and runs to it at a full charge.”
The bearded man named for one of the four evangelists — Luke the Physician, Luke the Greek, Luke who was represented by the winged white ox — had raised his brows.
“An auspicious introduction,” he said. “And where are you from, Rey, Just Rey?”
She had accompanied Reverend Luke Skywalker on his tour through the orphanage and the center courtyard garden, showing him the patch where she grew her sunflowers, and when news got around that Miss Remembrance Nobody was being adopted it set Mr. Plutt the collier into a wild laughing fit.
“Bunkum,” he had said. “A man that age doesn’t want a brat your age unless he’s looking out for himself. Probably figures he’ll need somebody to empty his slop buckets and spoon-feed his soups, soon enough.”
Rey had picked up a piece of coal to chuck it at Plutt’s big greasy head. It hit him squarely on the nose.
“If I meet you again down in hell, Mr. Plutt, I’ll be sure to tell you whether or not you were right.”
Now Rey goes about her work with a vindictive intensity, after she is mostly certain Mr. Ben Solo the Undead has gone off somewhere to brood over his current predicament. When evening comes, which is around half-past five according to a pillar-and-scroll clock on the shelf, Rey washes at a basin and pins up her hair and puts on a white shirtwaist with a blue twillback skirt as evidence of her superior good breeding. She sets a second place at the table but leaves the plate empty; she lets it remain this way after she has finished eating and placed herself beside the sitting room’s stove with a shawl she is knitting from some spare yellow yarn. Her needles pause when she hears footfalls on the back porch.
She turns her work to begin another row, counting purls as she goes so as not to spoil the pattern. A pair of beaten brogans comes into the sitting room and stops.
“Miss Rey.”
“Quiet,” she says. “You’ll make me drop a stitch.”
To her mild incredulity and intrigue, he stays quiet. She reaches the end of the row and sets down the knitting in her lap.
“All right.” She tips her chair back on its rockers in order to regard him from a more insouciant angle. “What is it?”
The vigor of his walk has warmed him enough that Ben has removed his big coat. Beneath it he wears a faded band-collar shirt with an unraveling vest and his suspenders are frayed around the clips; it also confirms Rey’s supposition that this afternoon’s meal was likely the first half-decent one he has eaten in a good long while. He holds the coat bundled close to his chest as if for want of something better to do with his hands.
“I didn’t begin things between us the way I should’ve,” he says. “That could have been done better, on my part.”
Rey lets the rocking chair drop. She puts aside her knitting to feed another log into the stove, rearranging the white embers with a poker, and only when it is stoked to her satisfaction does she turn with her sooty hands on her hips to address him.
“Mr. Solo, I spent the first ten years of my life in a Manchester slum. If there was ever a time for better beginnings, I’ve long since passed it — all I’d like to know is whether or not you intend to accept my offer.”
“You haven’t made me an offer. You’ve only set disagreeable preconditions.”
There is a window in the sitting room with its curtains drawn aside and Rey can see her reflection there in the black glass: the winter, she remembers. The cold and the darkness and the mountain and the unanswering silence of the house.
She turns back to Ben.
“Then I now graciously extend you my hospitality as the sole legal and recognized owner of Skywalker Farm,” she says. “In return you are welcome to make whatever use of yourself around here that you find you’re able— or not.” It is a night without wind and the room’s only sounds are the clanks and complaints from within the stove pipe. “Well?”
He waits without taking his eyes from her. She notes that the long scar changes its course at his jawline and continues on down his neck, beneath his collar, like those great fractures scientific men claim rest far below the earth.
Rey had first discovered his photographs while she was searching for a tablecloth to use at Christmastime, extracting the tintypes from a rosewood hope chest and shaking them out of their crisp black paper sleeves. There had been others, as well, of an older man posed on horseback in a fringed, outlandish vest and a woman with her hair done up in elaborate braids, but it was the boy’s face that Rey had brought closer beneath a coal-oil lamp for study. In one he had been about ten years old and in the other he had looked maybe eighteen or twenty, which for Rey at thirteen had cloaked him in the clear, vast upper atmosphere of worldly experience. On the pictures’ pasteboard backs there had been two different dates in Luke’s southpaw-sloped handwriting, but the same name in both places, from the Latin word solus like the unaccompanied music and like those graves up on the hill.
Rey had put the two photographs back where she found them and locked the rosewood chest.
An updraft from the fire makes the stovepipe roar and resound. Ben Solo removes an arm from beneath the bundled coat to offer Rey his hand.
“Yes,” he says. “I accept.”
Rey comes forward to shake on their agreement, once, feeling the thorny calluses in his palm. Ben lets go first, going back into the shadows of the house to retrieve a bulls-eye lantern from where Rey keeps it hung on a nail beside the coats and the carbine. He lights the lantern with a sulfide match and is nearly at the door again before Rey speaks.
“So are you going to tell me where you’ve been, the last ten years?”
“No,” he answers. “I’ve only been gone for seven.”
He leaves the house and walks off into the blue-black night. By the sway of the lantern Rey can trace his progress, beyond the barn and the chicken coop and into the upper half-story of a wagonshed set far back against the trees, and she is still watching when this lantern is blown out and everything beyond the window goes dark.
…
For the first two weeks Rey sees so little of him that his presence is evidenced almost solely by the cracked ice she finds on the rain barrel each morning, where he goes at dawn to wash his hands and shave his face. Milk from the goats is strained and bottled as if by ensorcellment; corn, oats, ground bones and eggshells and fish meal transfigure themselves into mash for feeding the chickens; the beehive is wrapped in tar paper against the cold and its entrance is barred with netted wire against the mice; she finds notes written in charcoal by a parsimonious, slicing hand, slipped beneath the door to inform her how the broad axe needs a new handle or the gate needs a new post.
On a whole it is rather like living in the company of some benevolent fey creature, except Rey carries with her an inborn Briton knowledge of the fact that the fey do not dispense their favors for free. She grows so accustomed to seeing him without really seeing him, in fact, that one evening she looks up into the orchard and feels a hard, quick crack of superstitious terror through her heart when she finds him there in the twilight under the trees.
He is walking towards the mountain and the woods; twenty minutes later he comes down again. He retrieves his supper from off the porch where Rey has left it in a pail.
She takes to scrutinizing his work, whatever trace he leaves of it. She examines the angle at which he has split a certain piece of poplar with the maul — but the grain in poplar wood is as smooth as water, she thinks, it splits true every time — and the manner in which he has harnessed Dio to the wagon. It had taken Rey more than a year to learn such things, another six months to do them as well as Reverend Skywalker believed they ought to be done; she had gone to bed each night with a sore back and a deep-bruised, sullen temper, although she had always returned to her various humiliations the next day like a Gettysburg artilleryman mustering to greet another barrage.
“I’m good at all sorts of things,” she had once announced, seated before a dispiriting production of lumpish wheat cakes. “You just don’t care. I could probably filch the buttons right off your waistcoat and you’d be none the wiser.”
Reverend Skywalker had risen from his seat, retrieved a blank book with its pages stitched together by coarse twine, and in red pencil he had sketched two plants; his false right hand kept the book steady while he worked. Rey watched him.
“This is pokeberry,” he had said. “It’s used for making dyes, but you can’t eat it. And this is a black walnut, which you can. You’ve got to peel away the soft green shell here to get at the part you want — do you think you can find them? They’ll be of somewhat more use to you than stolen buttons, I'd imagine.”
Rey had scoffed, clamped the sketchbook under her arm and returned the same afternoon with her dress pockets crammed full of walnuts, her sleeves bespattered in pokeweed stains. She had held up a page covered with new drawings.
“What’s this flower called?” she had asked. “And this tree, what’s that?”
Rey walks along her beds of dog rose and lavender to see that Ben has already mulched them for the winter. There is a new creep put up in the sheep pen, as an early preparation for the spring lambs, and the fence-palings are all nailed precisely nine inches apart; Rey brings out a measuring rod to be certain. Chewie never barks at him or tries to eat his shoes.
But he was born here, she tells herself. He was raised here. Naturally, he would have the advantage.
She sees him go off into the hills on another evening, and another, and another; the fifth time, Rey tosses an old buffalo-hide coat over her shoulders to follow him.
The tall grass in the orchard conceals several rotten windfall apples within its tangles and her feet squelch down on them. There is a dirt path through the woods that leads to a great granite rock and then forks. Down one way is the spring-fed pond, where Rey catches her trout and cuts her ice; up the other way is the high meadow, set just far enough above the trees that it affords a long view down into the valley and over the rooftops of the town. On the southern edge of the meadow is a little plot of five graves surrounded by a split-rail fence.
Rey ascends through the fast-gathering sundown and finds Ben standing there. Her dried flowers have not been removed.
She steps into the clearing but comes no further. Ben keeps his head bent, his feet slightly apart and his hands tucked into his pockets, the overall composure of a man who has opted to make his fate a sort of voluntary affair. It is the posture in which Rey had most often imagined him, that phantasmal dark-eyed figure from the tintype photographs whose dimensions she could expand or collapse like the character in a dime-novel according to her childhood moods. He has existed in a sort of mythic space, over the last seven years, self-contained and inaccessible to the ordinary experiences of suffering and sorrow and regret, and somehow Rey has thus far forgotten that he is an orphan, too.
“Did Luke ever tell you why I left?”
She startles. His position has not changed and thus he seems to have put this question to the mountain that rises beyond the meadow. The ridgelines run straight north, on the maps, and they become the Green Mountains somewhere up in Vermont, although geologically speaking they are all a part of the Appalachians that were born before history from titanic collisions between the continents.
“No,” Rey answers. “He didn’t.”
“I made a whole litany of reasons for myself,” Ben says, “but mostly it was because I didn’t want to be buried less than a quarter-mile from where I was born.”
Rey turns towards the view down into the valley. The retreating sunlight has paused briefly on the surrounding mountaintops as though to rest its feet. “The quarter-mile makes a considerable difference, though. On a clear day you can probably see for fifty miles.”
“Yes.” Ben looks over his shoulder, although not by enough that Rey can study his face. “That’s why my grandfather chose it.”
“You wouldn’t have chosen it for yourself?”
“I certainly wouldn’t have made the choice believing it should dictate what a boy growing up several decades later could or couldn’t do with his life.” The horizontal sunlight strikes his eye; he looks around at the graves again. “Then one day I found myself a thousand miles away and realized it was still the same life, wherever I went. I figured I might as well be a miserable fool here as anywhere else.”
Rey’s fingers are cold. She pulls them into the buffalo-hide coat’s thick sleeves. “Why didn’t you come home sooner?”
Ben takes a hand from his pockets, goes down to one knee — the lamed leg gives him some trouble— and swipes grime away from the letters of his father’s name: Han like the name Johannes, who lays beside Leia like the name of Israel’s first wife, who lays beside Padme like the lotus-flower pedestal of a goddess from the East Indies, who lays beside Anakin Skywalker.
“It was never in the same direction as I was going.” Ben pauses. “And it was a long journey. I could only afford to do it once.”
“Once would’ve been enough,” Rey says. “Luke would have asked you to stay.”
“I know.” Ben shifts his eyes to the ironweed flowers at the base of his mother’s headstone, still striking despite where their leaves and purple florets have browned. “I haven’t thanked you yet for bringing those. They were her favorites.”
He does not rise again, keeping his fingers on the grave’s flecked gray stone. Rey walks down to the farmhouse with its lighted windows; when he comes to fetch his supper from the back porch she is waiting there for him.
“I only told you to sleep in the wagonshed,” Rey says. “I never told you to take all your meals there, too.”
Ben hesitates, one foot on the porch and one on the path to the dooryard gate, but when she stands aside he goes past her into the house. She breaks the bread she has made and gives him half; he eats it, in silence, and Rey thinks it best not to ask him why he is weeping.
Perhaps this would not change anything for him, either.
…
There are several brief squalls in late October, bringing wet flakes the size of three-cent pieces that melt within the hour, but the first real snow comes the second week in November on the feast day for Saint Martin of Tours. It measures six inches on the roof below Rey’s bedroom window but piles higher against the house and barn, its drifts as smooth as the breasts of mourning doves; she finds Ben attempting to break the rain barrel’s ice with a mattock she keeps for stripping tree bark.
“There’s some water heating on the stove.” She has opened the kitchen window to speak with him. It tumbles flour-light snow off the casement and onto his bowed head. “Unless this is really meant to be a ritual mortification of the flesh you’ve got to engage in every morning. I still don’t understand what’s usually expected of you Lutheran men.”
“Luke was the Lutheran.” Ben fluffs the snow from his hair. “My father was an agnostic.”
“The elbow-shaker with the golden dice? That’s a surprise.” She pulls her head inside but leaves the window sash raised about an inch; she shouts so he can hear her. “I kept trying to tell Luke he should think about indoor plumbing, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“Of course not,” Ben calls in reply. “That’s for city folk.”
“What is? Listening?”
“It’s not manners to be fresh with your elders, Miss Rey.”
“I’m only supplying you with the facts, Mr. Solo. They’ve got these pumps now that can bring up the water straight from your own well. I’ve been reading about them in The American Engineer .”
He appears at the door and bangs his feet clean against the stoop. His ears and nose are pinked from the cold.
“But then you’d need electricity for the pump.” He stands still while Chewie nudges around inside his coat pockets, searching out the hidden rinds of bacon. “If you go that far, you might as well install a daytime telephone service and be done with it.”
Rey attempts to picture this. She would keep a table in the sitting room especially for her telephone, she decides, one with brass fittings and a crank handle and cream-painted finish, and whenever she wanted to talk to anybody at all in the whole country she could simply call the central operator and the operator would know just what to do; if anybody wanted to talk with her, they would do the same thing, and then her telephone would ring so she could come running right away to answer it.
She turns back to the hot-cakes she is making on a soapstone griddle.
“Maybe I’ll do it.” Rey flips all the cakes over. Their batter sizzles. “A telephone could be fun.”
“Telegrams are an aggravation enough.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never gotten one.”
He pours the heated water into a pottery bowl in a mushroom of steam and unsheathes his knife with the red abalone handle. Its steel sings out several times against the bowl’s edge while he sharpens it.
“Telegraph offices will charge you upwards of twenty cents a word.” He puts the knife aside to roll up his sleeves. “Nothing anybody could possibly have to say is worth that much.”
“The Nevada Territory telegraphed its entire constitution to Washington a few days ahead of the 1864 election. They needed to become a state so Mr. Lincoln could get their votes in the electoral college — something like that would be worth the money, wouldn’t it?”
“And then six months later Lincoln was dead,” Ben says. “In the end it didn’t do them any good.”
Rey returns peevishly to her griddle.
“Still.” She scrapes the edges with her spatula. “I like the general principle.”
“Hm.”
Rey transfers the cakes onto a plate. The only modern curiosities Luke had thoroughly and truly enjoyed, as she recalls, were the gramophone and those newfangled marshmallows made from instant gelatin; the wax cylinder gramophone had lasted them three years, before it broke, and the whole allure of the gelatin marshmallows from Luke’s studious perspective was dropping them into the hot chocolate they drank from their matched blue-painted porcelain cups and watching them dissolve like manna in the desert.
Ben does not speak any further, although Rey glances several times at his back while he leans over the bowl to blade his lathered cheeks with the knife. He has taken a mirror from his coat and propped it in an opened cupboard at eye level; it is one of those little pocket mirrors, with an advertisement for patent medicines on its back, and Rey squints to read the words Dr. Hux’s Superior Bile Activator in red lettering. When this is finished Ben cups the water in his hands and brings it to his face, combing it through the roots of his hair with his fingers. He eats several hot cakes out of a rather perfunctory courtesy before going back into the cold at his usual dogged, hitched pace, and by noon all the dove-smooth snow has been pockmarked by his cloddish footprints.
He rides down into Exegol the next day with Dio and the sled for a litany of dry goods Rey has requested —cornmeal, vinegar, bolts of calico, coal oil, humbug candies — and upon his return late that evening he presents Rey with a small yellow card. It has been sent via the American Telephone and Telegraph Company between the offices at Williamstown and Exegol, although by Rey’s estimation Williamstown is an additional five miles away.
MISS REY - STOP , the telegram reads. TRUST THIS FINDS YOU WELL - STOP. NO HUMBUGS SO BOUGHT CARAMELS INSTEAD - STOP. SIGNED BEN.
Rey looks up from her telegram; Ben is counting out the remainder of the money she had given him that morning and presents her with a dollar and fifteen cents.
“I was going to have it signed ‘Yours Most Sincerely,’” he drops the change into her hand, “but that would’ve set you back another nickel.”
“Oh.” She stays this way, holding the money and the telegram. “It’s all right. Mr. Shakespeare says that brevity is the soul of wit.”
Ben unravels a caramel from its paper wrapping and crackles it against his teeth. “‘And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes.’”
He goes off to unload the sled’s supplies — he’s probably got a college education, Rey guesses; he’s probably slept in hotels that had indoor plumbing with faucets for the hot and cold — and she sticks the folded telegram into her apron band.
...
Another storm rolls down off the mountains late on Thursday afternoon. The snow is as fine and weightless as sand, this time, but it falls in stinging scythes of wind that turn it almost sideways. Rey’s boxwood wall thermometer on the porch informs her that it is twenty-six degrees outside, down five degrees from the same time yesterday.
She wraps a shawl four times about her head to wade the several hundred feet between the farmhouse and wagonshed; Ben has shoveled some smoldering coals into an iron hod and is holding his damp woolen socks over the heat to dry them.
“Come inside the house,” she says. “If you freeze out here I won’t have any place to put your body until the spring thaw.”
Ben stands on one long leg and then another, like a great blue heron, wriggling into his socks. “Far be it from me to refuse such a courteous invitation.”
He brings with him several pieces of leather tacking that need a saddlesoap scrub. He keeps himself out from under Rey’s feet, as she makes their supper, but he builds up a fire inside the sitting room’s stove before she comes in with her sketchbook. He has taken a slender volume of Greek drama down off the shelf — Euripides’s Helen, its cover says — and has his back mostly towards her while he reads; it shows a pale triangle of skin at the nape of his neck, where there are several stray birthmarks similar to the ones on his face. Rey bends up her knees into the chair and takes out her sharpened pencil.
She is drawing birds. There is a banditry of chickadees around which she works several larger cardinals and juncos, positioning a nuthatch along the paper’s edge so that he appears to be hopping his way down the page. She tries to fit a yellow-shafted flicker but finds she only has room to draw the bird’s head with its sharp, gleaming woodpecker beak. She keeps rotating the book so that oil from her palms will not smudge the lines. They had at one time all been simply birds to her, little ones or big ones, but as she learned their names from Luke she had written them down on the sketchbook’s interior cover and imagined personalities to match them: chipping sparrow, swamp sparrow, fox sparrow, goldfinch, bluebird, scarlet tanager, mockingbird, warbler, towhee, whippoorwill.
A floorboard creaks. Rey glances up to discover Ben at her shoulder, studying the drawings under her hands. He holds his head to one side.
“Did you teach yourself this?”
Rey finishes shading a feather before she answers. There is an elm that grows beside the house and she listens to its branches heave and swing like a tide.
“Mostly,” she says. “There was a sister at Tuanul Orphanage — she realized I hated to talk when I was angry, so she’d give me some newsprint broadsheets and tell me I could only stop after I’d filled all the empty spaces.”
She had not drawn any real pictures at first, strictly speaking. They had been great indecipherable scribbles, single lines that crossed backwards on themselves a thousand times and that had been impressed deep into the soft paper by the plumbago pencil’s splintered tip and by the manic efficiency of her rage. Whenever Rey tried to follow this scribble from its beginning to its end she had always lost her way, somewhere in between; she had balled each paper tightly up to burn it in the furnace, and then one day she had put her pencil to the paper’s center instead and drawn a single path that circled outward and outward until her lines jumped free from the paper's borders.
“What a pretty picture,” Sister Lanai had said, when she came to examine the finished work. “You’ve built a labyrinth for yourself.”
“No I haven’t,” said Rey, who had been reading a book of mythologies from the Boston circulating library. “A labyrinth’s what they trap monsters inside of.”
“A labyrinth is not always meant to be a maze. Sometimes it is a meditation exercise— it offers a single path, and you walk it both ways.” Sister Lanai had followed the line with a stubby finger. “There’s a lovely one on the floor of Chartres Cathedral, if my memory serves me correct.”
Rey had kept the drawing for a day, studying it under her bedcovers after the lights were put out, and the next morning she had dropped it off one of the wharves into the harbor. Her next picture had been a huge tree with bare, twisted branches.
Ben reaches past Rey’s shoulder to grasp the sketchbook’s upper corner.
“May I see?”
Rey lifts the book to him and watches his eyes as the pages tick past. Once or twice he pauses.
“This is the Takodana School.” He points. The picture in question is of a red schoolhouse built beside a haunt of birches. “When did they put up a new weathervane?”
“Last year,” Rey says. “A lightning storm took off the old one — it was the same storm that brought down all the maple trees I used for sugaring, out by the pond.”
“There’s better ones over on Threepio’s land. He’ll give you free passage to them if you ask.”
“Who?”
Ben flicks ten pages in reverse and turns the sketchbook around to show her a kit-kat portrait, a small elderly man with narrow shoulders supporting a protuberant head and pince-nez glasses that give him a look of polite indigestion. The man had sat for this drawing while at his office desk, as a barter for a two-dollar fee Rey had not been able to pay him, and had worried so much over the correctness of his pose that Rey threatened to hold him in place with woodworking clamps. He had let her keep the drawing, afterwards.
“Him.”
“Mr. Olivier?” Rey asks. “He’s the town clerk.”
“Philip Pericles Paternoster Olivier,” Ben pronounces. “Threepio — my father was the one who thought up the nickname. If he doesn’t answer to it anymore, it means the man’s finally acquired some dignity.” He turns to another page covered in sketched flowers, bloodwort and marsh marigold and blooming mountain laurel. “I see Luke turned you into an herbalist.”
“Not really. I didn’t get much further than learning to boil some tinctures.”
“That’s further than I ever got.”
He rests an elbow on her chair-back to turn more easily through the rest of her sketchbook, his lips pushed out slightly in contemplation. There are many pictures of Chewie; there are several of Dio, or at least his head, of the sheep and the chickens in twos or threes; there is one of Finn, dressed in his Sunday suit and standing in a way that Rey had said would make him look like Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves; there is one of Luke’s wooden right hand, which he had left on occasion hanging by its leather braces from the coat rack or else had propped in the umbrella stand; there are none of Luke himself. Rey had started about a half-hundred of them, collectively, but had wiped them all clean with her rubber eraser or else had torn them from the book because the eyes or the mouth or the lines of the face were somehow wrong.
“I wish you’d let me see them anyway,” Luke had said, once, standing up from where Rey had posed him under the elm. “There’s no need to be so proud about it. Every picture teaches you something.”
Rey had clutched the sketchbook fast to her chest as he came over to peer down at it.
“Not this time,” she had told him, then and in repetition every time after. “The next one will be better.”
Ben reaches the end of the sketchbook with its list of birds, warbler and towhee and whippoorwill. He gives it back to her.
“There’s some pink moccasin flowers that grow in the woods behind the meadow, in June,” he says. “You haven’t drawn any pictures of those yet, have you?”
“No.” She keeps the sketchbook closed. “I’ll be sure to go and find them.”
He returns to his Euripides; Rey returns to her drawings. The storm passes on its way further northeast and the mercury in her boxwood thermometer now reads fifteen degrees, so she passes him some laundered sheets and an afghan from the linen chest but catches herself before she attempts to direct him up the stairs to the corner bedroom. They part ways on the landing and Rey lies awake a long time, listening to the whistle and sigh of the wind as it seeks out the cracks in the walls.
...
It is warm for several days, after this, so that the snow melts into a hard crust on the grass and sticks quick as flocking-powder to the trees still bearing their last yellow leaves. Ben removes himself to the wagonshed again, although not before Rey pursues him with a measuring tape from her sewing basket and ensnares him by the throat.
“I’ve got to get your collar size — now spread your arms.” He does as requested; Rey writes down the breadth of his wingspan on a slip of paper, six feet and three inches between the fingertips on his right and left hands. “You can’t go on wearing that same old shirt and coat all winter. We can get you a whole wardrobe from the Sears-Roebuck catalog for five dollars.”
“Don’t put yourself through the trouble.” He holds his neck straight while Rey loops her tape around his waist. “A man once told me I could keep myself warmed in a prairie blizzard with just the energy I wasted on all the arguments I was bound to lose against him anyway.”
“Which man was that?”
“He was a horse-dealer out in Nebraska,” Ben says. “We made a trial of being business partners, for a while.”
“How’d it pan out?”
“Poorly.” He lifts his arms slightly for her; she is close enough that his knees brush the folds of her skirt. “Snoke didn’t much like answering to any authority except his own.”
Rey stops the measuring tape in place with her thumb. “Where is he now?”
There is the briefest possible pause, although it is as deep as the cleft between two opening notes in a song.
“Dead,” Ben says. “He’s been dead about two years, now.”
Rey steps around him to measure the height of his back, from the tailbone to the tops of his shoulderblades, which is not necessary but is the only modest privacy she can quickly give him.
“Well.” She keeps her fingers pinched so that she will not have to touch him more than necessary. “That’s at least one other authority he was answerable to, in the end.”
“It was.”
She questions him regarding his favorite color — Ben claims not to have one — and requests his hat size — Ben evokes his rights under the Fifth Amendment in withholding this information — but is able to wrangle out the fact that he would accept a new pair of boots, except for the expense; Rey has some money put aside from selling her shoat-pigs the previous spring and claims she will enjoy playing the role of a spendthrift. She had originally planned on saving up this money as a gift for Luke, a Sholes and Glidden typewriter to compose those manuscripts he never finished, but she sees nothing educational in telling Ben this. At the last moment of decision she adds a black opera cloak to the catalog order, merely to rile him.
It is warm for three days more, so that snowmelt puddles the yard, and one morning Rey wakes before it is light to a sound of pandemonic screaming.
Her mind detaches itself the rest of the way from whatever dream it has been in, by which time she is already out of bed and into her boots, and she comprehends what the raucous screaming means; something has gotten inside her chicken coop.
The big carbine will likely do her no good, in that small, tight space and against something that doubtless has better eyesight and reflexes than she does, so Rey scrabbles under the bed for a box that contains a six-shot revolver with a swing-out cylinder — loading gates are better, Luke had told her, it makes you think a bit more about every bullet — and she goes pounding downstairs in her nightdress.
There is no moon and Rey navigates the distance largely by intuition, tripping only once in the process. Her hens are Rhode Island Reds, save for a speckled Plymouth Rock who collects colored pebbles, and they all possess the hysterical, brittle temperaments of those women in English novels who are forever complaining about their nerves. Something has torn back the coop’s fencing and please, Rey thinks, please, at least don’t let it be a bear, and please let me get there before Chewie does, because that son of a bitch will try to give a good account of himself no matter how old he really is.
The chickens are making such a catawampus racket from their commingled fear and indignation that the noise crowds painfully into Rey’s head. She swings the gun up and fires her first shot into the air; inside the coop there is a snarl.
“Out,” she bellows. “Get out. Shoo.”
She kicks through the gate into the coop, stepping over the scattered feathers and the hens as they flail about. A shadow parses itself from the others in a protracted leap; she fires twice more. The revolver’s muzzle flash blinds her, both times, the reports coming like whip-cracks, but her vision clears in time to watch the long legs and docked tail of a bobcat rush through the torn fence and away across the fields.
The chickens all give her an aggrieved look.
“You girls need to learn a few things about keeping your heads in a crisis.” Rey lowers her gun. “One of Mr. Darwin’s pupils thinks you’re linearly descended from the dinosaurs — try and act like it, once in a while.”
She stands breathing hard in the dark. Her heart is bucking so violently it shakes her chest and hands and skull, and the pulse rockets into her mouth again when there is a slight, perturbed cough from the far corner of the coop. Seven years of Luke’s strict trigger discipline instruction is more or less all that keeps Rey from firing a fourth time, and then the starlight articulates Ben standing there with the broad axe in one hand. The other hand is flat against his side.
“Ben?” Rey has not gotten the wind fully into her lungs. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, Miss Rey,” his voice is hoarse, though rather meek, “but you’ve shot me.”
Rey pauses. There is a ringing in her ears and the old nightdress she wears has a green gingham pattern.
“I beg your pardon?”
He leans heavy on her as they stagger back together into the house; she does not wish to try her luck with the stairs and thus deposits him on a divan in the sitting room before bringing a lighted lamp. Her bullet has only winged him, from what Rey can see through his coat, but blood keeps rising between her fingers no matter how she presses onto the wound. She harries about the kitchen like a vexed goose, expending her entire lexicon of curses several times over, and Ben watches her from under drowsily hooded eyes. There are chicken feathers caught in his hair.
“If it’s any consolation,” he says, slurring only somewhat when he does, “it’s rare that abdominal wounds like this prove rapidly fatal.”
“That isn’t a consolation in the slightest.” She uncorks the old whiskey bottle from beneath the floorboards, the one his father kept hidden beside the playing cards and gilded dice. “You’re bleeding on my furniture.”
“This is my furniture,” he stops to take a guttural breath, “and I will bleed on it however much it pleases me.”
He jerks to alertness when Rey dumps out the whiskey over his wound, but he holds his shirt up dutifully while she opens a medicine pannier to retrieve the rolled cotton dressings and a brown bottle of silver chloride antiseptic. She keeps the dressings wadded in place until the bleeding slows; he sits up with pained tenderness and Rey kneels between his legs to bind his waist in the long strips of bandaging, reaching her arms around him so that she can pass the roll rapidly between her fingers. Her mouth is somewhat muffled where it is tucked against his shoulder by this arrangement.
“I can’t imagine what you thought you were doing out there,” she says.
“Protecting your livestock.” He flinches from her hands like a skittish horse. “I had no way to know you’d come blazing in like some El Paso pistolera.”
“Ah, so it’s your furniture but my livestock, is it? That’s a nice piece of sophistry if I ever heard it. I’m sure you’ll apply it next time the sheep pen needs a cleaning, too.”
“I have no quarrel with sheep. I just make it my business to have as little to do with chickens as possible.” His breathing is regular but rather shallow. “I’ve met roosters who would’ve gone up and fought God, if only they’d been able to fly higher.”
She laughs, helpless to halt herself and still weak through the limbs and innards and heart from fear. His blood has gotten onto her hands and nightgown, and within her encompassing arms she can feel his big warm body beginning to tremble. She pulls away; his eyes are closed.
“I’ll ride to get Doctor Holdo in the morning,” she says. “I don’t want to leave you here alone yet.”
Ben falls back against the divan. “I don’t know a Doctor Holdo. Who is he?”
“She,” Rey says.
“She,” he repeats, and opens his eyes again; there is something unfamiliar there, vulnerable and startled by its own afflicting vulnerability. “It’s all right, Rey. I’ve survived worse.”
Rey is shifting through the medicine pannier for something to dull the pain, but she stops. His scar stands out as a harsh, raw red against the pallor of his face; she reaches over to nit-pick the chicken feathers from his hair.
“Is that another of your shoddy attempts at consolation?”
“Possibly.”
“You can knock under with it, then — and stop talking while you’re at it, if you please.”
“Yes, Miss Rey.”
Rey must rouse him one more time, in order to put a clean sheet beneath him and a clean blanket over him. When he finally falls into a frangible, bloodless sleep she goes away to wash her hands, to change the ruined gown, but she comes back again to sit with him and stays like this until the daybreak.
…