He stopped and knew not what to say. How thin she was!
Presently she told him, so low he could scarcely hear: “Tom’s dead.”
“Oh, no.” Darkness came and went before his eyes.
“I learned the day before yesterday, when a few of his men straggled home. He was killed in the San Bruno.”
Mackenzie did not dare join her, but his legs would not upbear him. He sat down on the flagstones and saw curious patterns in their arrangement. There was nothing else to look at.
Her voice ran on above him, toneless: “Was it worth it? Not only Tom, but so many others, killed for a point of politics?”
“More than that was at stake,” he said.
“Yes, I heard on the radio. I still can’t understand how it was worth it. I’ve tried very hard, but I can’t.”
He had no strength left to defend himself. “Maybe you’re right, duck. I wouldn’t know.”
“I’m not sorry for myself,” she said. “I still have Jimmy. But Tom was cheated out of so much.”
He realized all at once that there was a baby, and he ought to take his grandchild to him and think thoughts about life going on into the future. But he was too empty.
“Tom wanted him named after you,” she said.
Did you, Laura? he wondered. Aloud: “What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll find something.”
He made himself glance at her. The sunset burned on the willow leaves above and on her face, which was now turned toward the infant he could not see. “Come back to Naka-mura,” he said.
“No. Anywhere else.”
“You always loved the mountains,” he groped. “We—”
“No.” She met his eyes. “It isn’t you, Dad. Never you. But Jimmy is not going to grow up a soldier.” She hesitated, “I’m sure some of the Espers will keep going, on a new basis, but with the same goals. I think we should join them. He ought to believe in something different from what killed his father, and work for it to become real. Don’t you agree?”
Mackenzie climbed to his feet against Earth’s hard pull. “I don’t know,” he said. “Never was a thinker ... Can I see him?”
“Oh, Dad—”
He went over and looked down at the small sleeping form. “If you marry again,” he said, “and have a daughter, would you call her for her mother?” He saw Laura’s head bend downward and her hands clench. Quickly he said, “I’ll go now. I’d like to visit you some more, tomorrow or sometime, if you’ll have me.”
Then she came to his arms and wept. He stroked her hair and murmured, as he had done when she was a child. “You do want to return to the mountains, don’t you? They’re your country too, your people, where you belong.”
“Y-you’ll never know how much I want to.”
“Then why not?” he cried.
His daughter straightened herself. “I can’t,” she said. “Your war is ended. Mine has just begun.”
Because he had trained that will, he could only say, “I hope you win it.”
“Perhaps in a thousand years—” She could not continue.
Night had fallen when he left her. Power was still out in the city, so the street lamps were dark and the stars stood forth above all roofs. The squad that waited to accompany their colonel to barracks looked wolfish by lantern light They saluted him and rode at his back, rifles ready for trouble; but there was only the iron sound of horseshoes.