go and take a look to be sure.” Should she say this? Journey didn’t know what else to do. “I didn’t read the whole journal as closely or as many times as I read the parts that talked about you. Saul made many entries about his life through the years but once you disappeared, I wasn’t as interested in the rest.”
Reno sat still, absorbing what she’d told him. “So, I guess I don’t go back.”
“I don’t know how much is set in stone.” She sought to pacify him. As much as she wanted him to stay, to see his dismay was disheartening. “Everyone there believed…and anyone who read the journal believed that you’d been killed by the Indians. Your body was never found, but –”
“Because I didn’t die,” he whispered. “I came here.”
She glanced at him. “Like I said, we don’t know if the past can be changed. Maybe you can go back.”
And maybe he couldn’t. Reno rubbed an ache in his chest. He felt so helpless. Completely at the mercy of forces he couldn’t understand. “Maybe.” He knew he had to try. “About my brother. Do you want to know the whole story?”
“You know I do.”
For the next thirty miles, Reno told Journey about his brother. His childhood. About his parents. “What gets me is that I worshiped my father. And I loved Cole. My anger wasn’t at Cole because my old man chose him over me, it was because Silas didn’t want me too. He let his family dictate to him that my mother and I weren’t good enough. He wanted their money more than he wanted us.”
Journey felt so bad for Reno. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Wasted sympathy. Those days are long gone.” This truer than true statement made him laugh wryly. “Clay came into the picture and I love him as dearly as I do Cole. He is a genuinely good man and I don’t know how he turned out so well. His homelife was hell. There might’ve been days my mother and I didn’t have enough to eat, but I was never beat within an inch of my life like Clay. He suffered unmercifully at the hand of his piss poor excuse of a father.” He stopped to take a breath as Journey waited at a red light. “Old Revered Bennett was a holier-than-thou circuit riding preacher. The best days Clay experienced were when his father was off holding week-long revivals at one of the little churches deep in the hills. Believe me, we took advantage of those reprieves. Clay had an uncle on his mother’s side who lived about a mile away. Reverend Bennett wouldn’t let him visit the uncle when he was home, but when he was away, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. The uncle was a widower with a son about our age. We’d visit back and forth with them. The uncle would take us hunting and he loaned me all the books I could ever want to read.” He smiled at the fond memories, but that smile soon faded. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without those three people when my mother died.”
“What happened to her?”
Reno swallowed hard; he didn’t like to talk about it even now. “I’m not sure, really. I mean, I know how she died. Someone shot her. Stray bullet is what most said. She was out tending the garden. I was in the front chopping wood when I heard the crack of the gunfire and the softest exclamation of pain you’ve ever heard. I barely heard her cry out – but the instant I did, I knew what had happened. I took off running around the cabin and through the cornfield. When I got to her, she looked like she was sleeping. The bullet had passed through her heart. She was gone.” He looked at his fingernails for a long moment. “I sent my father a telegram. He didn’t come. But Cole did. He helped me bury our mother. I didn’t see him again until years later, the day he found me at Five Forks.”
“Saul didn’t write about any of this.”
“I didn’t tell him the ugly things.” He shivered, but not from cold. “You can’t imagine what the war was like. What we saw. What we smelled.”
“I’ve just read about it, of course. Nothing to compare with actually living through it.”
“Clay and I were in the same unit. His uncle and cousin were in another. We’d all been caught up in the