Nobody moved. In the silence, guns exploding a short distance away could be heard. The man started to move down the fine, picking up the wallets and personal belongings. He walked to Devin.
“Where’s your visa, man? And your stuff?”
“I don’t have any,” Devin answered slowly, reaching into his pocket as if to prove his point.
“Watch it dude,” the man threatened.
Devin cautiously pulled out his papers. The man looked at them.
“Devin Milford. I be damned.” His face broke into a grin. “I heard you speak. I’m a ’Nam vet too.” He shrugged. “Hell, I would have voted for you. Get your stuff, the commander’ll get his rocks off seeing you.”
“I’ll stay,” Devin, said quietly.
“What the hell for?”
“Just my preference.”
“They get your balls?”
Devin remained silent.
“Shit. You sure turned gutless. Things got a little rough in ninety-two and you folded. The hell with it. You’re not worth the trouble. Maybe I should cut you off right here—save you the trouble of livin’ the rest of your life.”
Devin just looked evenly at him. The man stood firm, then finally moved away to fill his bag from the rest of the car. Outside, a car honked—the signal to withdraw. As the man came back down the car, he stopped beside Devin, who was again facing the window.
“You’re nothin’,” he grunted. He started to leave, then suddenly reached out and gave Devin a vicious chop to the back with the butt of the gun. Devin pitched forward. The Resister thought briefly about shooting the man he had once admired, but the insistent homs outside changed his mind. He walked out the door of the train, his black figure blending into the darkness of night.
It was still dark when the tarnished Amtrak train pulled into the terminal. Built in 1890, the station had retained an atmosphere of grandeur with its vast vaulted ceilings made of stone from nearby quarries. At this time of night, it was virtually deserted.
Devin got off the train alone and walked slowly down the platform toward the main waiting room. Once inside, he stood perfectly still for a moment, trying to get his bearings. He spotted two soldiers along the far wall—one national guardsman, one SSU. The American soldier wore an olive-drab helmet liner, the other a white liner with wraparound blue stripes: the mark of a UN peacekeeper. Instinctively, Devin moved away from them, circling around the perimeter of the cavernous room, as might a fugitive.
Ward was standing against the far wall, studying this newcomer. When he finally recognized him, he was shocked at how Devin had aged, at how thin and gaunt he was. Devin’s beard was new, and Ward was startled by the fact that it was almost entirely gray, a sharp contrast to the chestnut brown of Devin’s hair and mustache. Ward pushed his felt hat back from his forehead, sighed, and walked slowly toward his younger brother.
When Ward was still some thirty feet away, Devin looked up, instinctively aware that he was being approached. His look caused Ward to hesitate for a moment.
“God, Dev—” He stopped abruptly, his sadness at what Devin had become spilling into his voice.
Devin tried a smile and a shrug. Tears filled his eyes. Slowly, he extended his hand. “Hello, Ward.”
Ward ignored the hand and gave his brother a bear hug. Carefully, Devin put his arms up to Ward’s waist. They held each other, as Ward grimaced to hold back his tears. “It’s the shits, man. God damn if it ain’t.”
And then he attempted a joke. “What a pair we are,” he said. “Me fatter’n ever and you about to dry up and blow away.” Ward reached down and grabbed Devin’s duffel bag. They walked toward the exit side by side—they didn’t exactly feel like strangers, just not like the brothers they’d once been.
They drove most of the way in silence, the faint light from the dashboard illuminating their faces. For most of Ward’s life, Devin had outshone him. Ward had dropped out of college after one year, gotten married, and joined the sheriff’s office. Unlike Devin, he had been content to live and raise his family in Milford. He knew he was not a glamorous man or as intelligent as Devin. Yet he had never resented his brother’s success.
Or had he? In the buried psychological life of families, no emotion is ever quite unalloyed by tinges of its opposite. Had Ward Milford been a more sophisticated or self-aware man, he might have wondered if his curiously dispassionate greeting of his prodigal brother might not have had some deeper cause.
Finally, as they neared town, Ward’s voice broke into the silence. “You get much news down there?”
Devin shook his head.
“That’s what we figured.” Ward sighed. “Never heard from you so we figured you never got anything from us, neither.”
“You write?” Devin asked tentatively.
Ward nodded. “To you, care of the state. You?” Devin shook his head. “It wasn’t permitted.”
Ward suddenly pulled the truck to the side of the road, leaving the motor running. “Look,” he said. “There’s some things you oughta know. We took some heat back there. Dad lost most of the farm. They confiscated it, said it was reparations—for you being a people’s enemy. They moved a bunch of Exiles on our land. And they bumped me out of being a sheriff. I’m not complaining.” He smiled, though he found it difficult to keep an accusing edge out of his voice. “I guess I’m lucky to be around at all. I guess what I’m sayin’ is don’t expect a hero’s welcome or anything like that.”
Devin was silent a moment. “If it had been my choice, I wouldn’t have come back.”
“Yeah. Well, just so you know what you’re walkin’ into.”
Ward pulled back onto the road and the truck was quickly swallowed by the darkness.
The sun rode the horizon as they drove up the poplar-lined driveway to the Milford house. Devin was shocked to see its broken windows and peeling paint. Like all of us, he’d remembered his childhood home as grander than it really was. During the period of his imprisonment, the once-stately Milford homestead had grown in his imagination to plantation-home proportions, with columns, porticoes, deep and richly shadowed porches. What he saw instead was a modest farmhouse giving off a whiff of rotted beams and no longer quite straight on its foundation. He said nothing.
“I’ll just drop you,” Ward said. “I’ve got to make a run into town. The deputy gets the dawn patrol.”
“No problem,” Devin said.
Devin stood before the old Victorian farmhouse but did not enter. Instead, he walked across a stream, which ran, uneven and lovely, through the field. He scooped his hand into a small eddy around a large cluster of rocks and, with the first simple pleasure he had known for years, brought the frigid liquid to his lips. He took in the precious landscape, the farmland lying in winter calm. He turned from the bank and crossed the field to a small cemetery, standing alone in the middle of the field, silhouetted against the gold-red sky. Rows of simple markers stood erect, sheltered beneath an ancient oak where four generations of Milfords lay. This spot had always seemed sacred to Devin. He wondered if he still had the moral fiber to think of it, or of anything, as holy.
He walked. His steps were guided not by conscious thought, but by a bone-deep recollection of the contours of the land, the textures of fields and stream banks underfoot. The sun rose and grew warm even through the winter chill. The light changed from lavender to rose to gold to white, and still Devin found himself wandering. If not content, then at least he was free of the constraint that had barred his movements for so long.