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It’s late in the summer night, late enough that the sun has set, when I hear the shed door creak open behind me.
“Need help, mom?”
“No, I’ll be right there,” I reply absently. Flame, my back is going to give out on me any one of these days. I peel off my old gardening gloves slowly and stiffly, setting them next to the scythe and massaging my wrists. He comes closer, blinking owlishly as his eyes adjust to the dark. “I’m almost sixteen now. I dunno why I’m in school when I should be helping you in the fields.”
"Oh, honey, it’s okay.” His presence makes the long days seem short. I ruffle his hair with the back of my dirty hand and smile at him fondly. “I work hard so you can follow your dreams, son.”
He smiles. “But I don’t want to go to school either.”
“Oh yeah?” I laugh. “What, do you want to end up a candlemaker in your future?”
“I want to be a crusader,” he says quietly.
The ache of my palms is loud in the darkness. I swallow and nearly choke on it as everything I want to say tries to claw its way out of my mouth at once.
“I’ll become a crusader,” he says again, more bravely this time. “And I’ll find dad. That’s what my heart says.”
My hand drops numbly to my side.
I have never, not once in my life, wanted to strike a child. But tonight I turn my head like a wooden puppet and see that man standing there, looking out at me through my son’s eyes, and my palms ring loud and deafening with the pain. With splinters in my skin that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
“No,” I say unthinkingly, voice shaking. “Please. No.”
“I knew you’d say that.” He bites his lip.
I close my eyes. My breathing has gotten so shallow that there’s a buzzing in my ears, and I have to remind myself not to scream at him. My hands are very still on the table.
“Don’t you want him back?” My son is clenching his fists unconsciously. There are tears welling in his eyes now. “I miss him. I know you do too.”
I’m drowning in his presence every day and every night. If it weren’t for you I would have burned this farmstead to the ground ten years ago and fled to make my way in a bigger town, but for you, for you, for you…
“I…” I’m suffocating. My lungs won’t contain the rage rising in my chest. Ten years of lying, collapsing in on me like an avalanche.
“He’s not dead. His name’s not on any of the lists.” My son’s voice rises frantically.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” I’m crushing him alongside me. This shed isn’t big enough for two, but outside it’s just the empty fields, the empty night, fifty acres of dirt watered by my bloody palms. There’s nowhere to run. This fight has been a long time coming.
“It has to mean something—“
“He’s dead. He’s dead, alright?”
“But what if he isn’t?!”
“Then he’s a damned coward!” I slam my hands against the table hard enough to shove it forward with a dull scrape. “He’s a coward, or a broken man. Or he’s a monster who chose the war over his own wife and son!!”
“He went to die for us!” He shouts at me, crying in earnest now. “He wouldn’t just leave! I don’t know where they’ve sent him but I’m going to find out and I’m going to bring him back!”
“I don’t want him back.”
The betrayal in my son’s face is like watching him leave all over again.
He remembers his father like a god. Beautiful, powerful, mounted on a stallion in his brand-new conscription armour, banners flying as he rode to war.
I remember him still with that nervousness in his eyes. He’d stood fumbling in our kitchen as he tried to do up his pauldrons one-handed, and then my own hands were on his warm chest, feeling him breathe out as I drew the straps tight. Standing ankle-deep in the mud of our barren fields, he’d swung a sword for the first time and he’d laughed— “It’s just a bigger scythe,” he’d jibed, and then his lower lip had shaken and he’d fallen silent.
That man was dead. Reynauld, my Reynauld, had died somewhere out there on the battlefield, and his name would never be on any of the lists because there was a stranger who’d stolen his skin and donned his helmet and was still riding to war to this day, riding away from us without ever looking back.