The rain came hard after dark. Inside the farmhouse the couple sat with their two dogs. No fire in the hearth. The lantern on the side table made shadows that moved when the wind hit the windows.
Clearwater sat by the glass. His hands were rope-scarred and thick-knuckled from forty years pulling nets. Now they rested empty in his lap. Outside was only black and the sound of water.
Georgina turned pages without reading. The chocolate lab slept at her feet. The young shepherd watched the old man, ears tracking sounds only dogs could parse from weather.
Something yellow moved past the gate. Clearwater blinked. The boy's raincoat. Same one he wore that morning in 1915, canvas stiff with newness, his mother's stitching at every seam. The gate empty now. Rain and alder branches.
But the feeling stayed. That pull in his chest like fishing line going taut.
Clearwater stood. The shepherd lifted its head but made no sound. He moved through the mudroom past his boots and out into the weather in slippers that were older than most men's marriages.
The cold was immediate and complete. But something warm opened in his ribs. Tommy was down by the brook. Clearwater could smell pine smoke and hear his son's voice in the trees ahead, impatient the way eight-year-olds are impatient with fathers who move too slow.
Georgina looked up and his chair was empty.
She listened past the rain for his shuffle-step in the hall. Nothing came back. Her chest compressed. The book hit the floor when she stood. The lab raised its grey muzzle.
"Clay?"
The house held its silence.
She pulled on the oilskin with hands that remembered younger cold, younger fear. The lantern's flame bent when she lifted it. She looked at both dogs. The shepherd was faster but the lab knew his scent and the woods and what time had done to both.
She took the lab and stepped outside.
The grass was soup. Rain drove sideways into her hood. She held the lantern high and its light barely reached the treeline. The old dog moved beside her, head low, reading ground she couldn't see.
Clearwater entered the trees. Branches took skin from his face. The trail was gone, choked under sixty summers of growth, but in his mind it ran clear and ahead of him Tommy carried the lunch pail, tin bright with molasses-bread wrapped in wax paper.
"Tommy." His voice came out rust. "Slow down."
The wind brought back laughter. High and clean, before the war made meat of boys on both sides of the channel.
Georgina reached the trees. Called his name into weather that swallowed sound. The lab barked once, short and businesslike, nose working. She moved forward. The lantern swung shadows through spaces between trunks.
Mud grabbed at her. Roots surfaced like old bones. Somewhere ahead Clearwater followed ghosts deeper. She knew these trails forty years back when her legs carried her and his mind held its edges. Now the dark made everything foreign.
Her boot caught. The earth opened. She went down the bank with nothing to grab, time stretching the way it does when you leave the ground. She watched the lantern spin, its arc like something mathematical, something pure.
Then the bottom. Hard. Air punched from her lungs in one bright instant of emptiness.
The lantern found rock. Glass went white then black. The light died.
She lay in mud at the bottom. Rain on her face. The lab circling above, whining, searching for a way down it couldn't find. Her ribs were broken glass when she tried to breathe. Something warm ran from her hairline.
Clearwater walked on. His slippers were pulp. He no longer felt his feet. The trees opened and there it was. The swimming hole. Clear water reflecting sky that had been gone since Diefenbaker.
"Tommy?"
The voice that came out belonged to a child.
The brook moved over stones, saying nothing.
He stood at the edge. Rain running down his face like it was trying to wash something away. In his mind Tommy was still eight. Still breathing. Still real. But the water held only black and the boy had been French mud since 1918.
Behind him, the old lab sat at the bank's edge. Below, Georgina lay still. The storm worked through the trees. Night held everything.