Page 103 of Head Room

She held up another rock.It wasn’t smooth and rounded like she wanted.It was sharp and jagged, like the hard darkness she swallowed, weighing down as it also cut from inside.

“I taste this hard darkness,” he said.

She knew.“It was being the only one.Always the only one.As you are here.”

He considered this.“Here you are a different only one.”

“Yes.”Still holding the jagged rock, she turned toward him.“I will always be the only one.You will always be the only one.Everyone sees that in us.It is clear.They see from the outside that we carry this rock inside us.But others are also the only one.”

He scoffed with a single sound.

She saw he accepted her state of only-ness and his own, of course.It was what made him consider leaving.But he did not see beyond that.

“Major Brand,” she said.

He didn’t move, but a stillness came to him.He was thinking.Seeing.

She added, “Corporal Fletcher.”

“No.”

“Yes.Look more closely.”Peter, too.But she would not disclose Peter’s rock of only-ness when these two still tussled as boys.

His silence opened to contemplation, the beginning of acceptance.

She raised the rock.“I have this inside me.You have it inside you.They have it inside them.Leaving here cannot change that.You will have that wherever you go.You think to go back?Your rock will grow even larger.You know.Youknow.You go elsewhere, your rock is still with you.You go alone to the mountains and still your rock remains.Because it is in you.”

She placed the rock on her discard pile.

“Find how to live with the rock, then go if you want.Do not go to leave the rock, because you will not.”

He watched Maggie talk to the boy.

He couldn’t hear the sound of it above the murmur of the creek, the shifting of the breeze.Except every once in a while, a whisper of it came through.

She was talking.Easily, freely.

She rarely did.To him only the necessities.He’d caught a few words between her and Peter and in such a way as to make him think there were more conversations between them.

****

So, Ransom waspromoted to corporal.

I was oddly pleased for a fictional character.

And it didn’t bother me that Irene hadn’t spelled out when or how it happened.Neither did the references only tothe boy.I was getting the hang of reading this incomplete manuscript.

The next section started with more notes from the author.

****

(Notes: Ransom is talking with a sergeant who’s a veteran of Dakota Territory and fighting Indians and has been shifted to their company.Talking about how there are small pockets of soldiers dotted along the telegraph wire, trying to protect it from Indian attacks.

“When you’re strung out here like a bit of twine trying to hold back a river, you don’t ask where the other strands come from.”

“Some do.”

The sergeant snorted.“Some are fools.Don’t know the difference between good soldiering and a fancy uniform.An’ mor’n likely, if they get assigned to the fancy uniform, they get themselves kilt before they find out.”