then, and as their laughter died down a new feeling swept over Cole, one that almost made his eyes well again.
If only they could keep going. If only they could keep driving, just the two of them, it didn’t really matter where. Out west. To California. Or down to Mexico. Or to New York City. Or all those places. Images fanned before him like a hand of cards: The two of them riding horses, riding choppers, riding big waves. The two of them piloting and co-piloting a small jet plane, eating steaks under a giant chandelier. There’d be daring adventures, heroics, and so forth wherever they roamed. It would get so that before they even arrived in a place, people would know their names.
It was crazy—where did he get his crazy ideas—and it made him feel selfish and guilty. No place for Tracy in any of his grand plans. But it wasn’t the first time Cole had felt the urge to run. Now that he was completely healthy again, he often felt restless, bored, as if he was stuck somewhere, waiting for something to happen or for some special knowledge to come to him. Bible study, lessons with Tracy, church, the games he played with the other children—it was not enough. He wanted more. And there were times when he felt as if there was a force holding him back. Some force was sitting on top of him, squelching and trapping him and preventing him from growing into who he was supposed to be. Like a colossal spider, it pressed its boulder of a body down while its legs caged him in. He would have to be Samson to break free.
If only they could keep going. It wasn’t like he was asking them to run away from God. God would be with them if they wanted him there. He remembered how he had missed Chicago after he moved to Little Leap. But if they never turned back, he did not think he would miss Salvation City.
If there was anything he yearned to talk about with PW it was this. But he did not know how.
ON THE WAY, they stopped at the place where PW’s great-grandparents were buried. Cole had been expecting a real cemetery, but this was just a cluster of a dozen or so weed-choked graves on a rise off one of the mountain roads.
It wasn’t a real family plot, either. “Though everyone here was kin to some degree or other.” PW had brought a trash bag for all the litter he knew they would find. Beer and soda cans, mostly; he gathered them up without a word. But Cole was surprised to see so much litter in that lonely spot. There weren’t even any houses nearby. The closest thing to a house they’d seen had been miles back: a horseshoe of weather-beaten mobile homes sharing a clearing with several vehicles in various stages of being gutted. Rust city. A swaybacked horse tethered to a post, head hanging low to the ground, and some equally forlorn-looking dogs staring mutely at the van as it passed, as if they didn’t have the strength to bark.
Some of the gravestones were sticking out of the ground at such odd angles it was easy to believe someone had tried toppling them. PW’s great-grandfather’s slab had a long crack running down it, and Cole pictured a night of pounding rain and a zigzag of lightning striking.
Jasper Carson McBell was only forty-four when he died, but that was not unusual for a man who’d worked in the mines from the time he was a teen.
“That’s what men did for a living here, generation after generation,” PW said. “Only my daddy broke with tradition. He always loved where he was born, but he didn’t want to end up in the mines. Besides, those jobs were melting away like snow-flakes in June and there wasn’t much of anything to replace them. He roamed around a bit till he settled in Lexington. His main job was supervising deliveries for a big furniture outlet, but he had good carpentry skills, too, so he did some of that to earn extra. He liked doing that kind of work more anyway. But I know for a fact he never did feel at home in the city. He might even have gone back if it hadn’t been so hard to find work. Also, Mama was no country girl, and it would’ve been hard for an outsider like her to fit in. But