Consignment

Prologue Christmas that year we went up to the mountains, just Fiona and Brad and me. There were a few inches of snow on the ground when we arrived Christmas Eve, but the sky was clear, so after we'd unloaded the car Fiona and I took a walk together down by the river while Brad chopped some logs for the fire. We went down the track, stepping over fallen branches, the bare woods were quiet all around us, even the murmur of the river was muffled by the snow. There were deer tracks beside the river, we waited awhile but the only creature we saw was a squirrel, it scurried along the leafless maple branches overhead, showering us with heavy white snowflakes. Fiona bent forward and shook her hair. I wrapped my arms around her waist, pretended to pitch her toward the icy river. She shrieked, then struggled, and we fell back on the soft white blanket. She laughed and scooped snow into my face. As I got to my knees, she shoved me and I went down again, and she ran, laughing, up through the woods. Fiona laughing. I can still remember that. Back at the shack, Brad already had the fire going, he was stretched out on the sofa, his head in a book. Fiona hung up her jacket, telling him he should get out while the weather was good. Weather's fine right here, Mom, he said. She rolled her eyes at me, then went to the kitchen to unpack the food and drink. Christmas Eve in the Rourke family. I didn't have the heart to bring it down. Christmas morning, we unwrapped our presents, then Fiona drove down to the store to make a call to her mother in Cleveland while Brad helped me with some minor repairs to the shack. Since starting college, Brad seemed to have spent every vacation on a field trip out of state, it had been a while since we'd shared any real time together. When he was a boy, he'd been proud that his father was a soldier. When he became an adolescent, my profession turned into something of an embarassment for him. That phase passed too, but nothing since had moved into its place, except, maybe, uncertainty. An unsureness of where to position me in the scale of adult relationships, at what point to fix me between hero and villain, friend and foe. So that Christmas morning the two of us crawled over the porch, hammering down loose nails, making small talk, and circling the possibility of some new connections between us that might replace the ones that, through the passage of time, we'd lost. When Fiona returned from the store, we set down our tools, with the real work not even begun. Maybe that had something to do with why, after lunch, I found myself setting out alone up the hill behind the shack, and, after twenty minutes, turning up the path toward the mountain pool that was sheltered by a ring of boulders. The pool where my father, one summer, taught me to swim. Now I scrambled around the snowcapped boulders and looked down at the iced surface, surprised at how small it seemed. I picked up a rock and threw it, it bounced on the ice. My father had once been a soldier. He'd fought in France when he was Brad's age, then returned home and gone to college on the GI Bill, and after that he spent his working life in insurance. When I turned eighteen, and told him and Mom that I was going to enlist, he took me aside and confided to me that it was only meeting Mom that had stopped him from reenlisting after college. The Army, the way he spoke, seemed to be the life he'd missed out on, the one he thought maybe he should have had. Their support for me never wavered. Through my cadetship at West Point, my first commission in the Rangers, then the Gulf War, and on through my hospitalization after Mogadishu, they stood by me. For Fiona it wasn't so easy. When we married, I promised Fiona I would leave the Army sometime around my thirtieth birthday. I told her that by then I would have fulfilled my youthful ambitions, I would have served my country and experienced life as a soldier,Sutherland, Grant is the author of 'Consignment' with ISBN 9780553801873 and ISBN 0553801872.