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Everett still went up to the old house up in the woods every hunting season, and had for as many years as he'd been home. That meant more without his legs than with, by now, years when he could clatter his way to a blind and sit in it for hours on end and get someone more able-bodied to dress his kills. Time took its toll, though, and the damp reached his bones. He'd hung up his gun once he was done teaching Ash to hunt and now his visits were purely recreational. Of course everyone else in the family wanted to use the old house on their own, enough that he scheduled dates for them in a grubby coil-ringed notebook in his workshop months in advance, but he took his week from Monday morning to Friday night, as if anyone would've grudged him use of it in the first place.
Sassy worried when he travelled alone, which meant some years he did it just to prove he could. The rest of the time, though, it was nice to have someone with two free hands and a working set of legs to come along, especially if he could scare up somebody who understood the meaning of peace and quiet. There were too many people in their clan who saw silence as a deliberate witholding of words, to be avoided at all costs, and he could deal with them anywhere but up in the hills when he didn't want to talk to anybody at all.
Sassy mentioned bringing Cameron along for the first time in September, and Everett rejected it right out of hand. His eldest son was the walking defintion of too many words packed into too little space, especially these days; he came home on odd weeks, in between gala dinners and medical appointments and whatever sinecure desk job Washington had rustled it up for its hero spaceship pilot, bubbling over with happy talk about everything he'd been up to. She mentioned it a second time in early October after one of those visits, where Cam had only stopped talking to eat, and the idea struck Everett as so preposterous he had to wonder if maybe his wife had a reason for it, since she was not a foolish woman. She didn't say why, so he just had to shrug and pick up the phone to make the invitation himself, hoping something'd come of it.
With gritted teeth behind his smile, Everett showed up at Asheville Regional Airport one morning in early November, and was surprised to find Cameron quiet. Not depressed or anything like that, not hiding a sulk or nursing a disappointment, and of course he smiled and waited for Everett to set his canes up right before squeezing his father in a carefully calibrated hug. Both legs of Cameron's flight had been too short to feed him, so they stopped on the western edge of Asheville to eat breakfast at Frank's. Frank came out of the kitchen to greet them; he and Everett had been friends since God was a baby and he'd known Cam since he was a baby, though he had an autographed picture of Everett's boy on his wall these days. Cam didn't ham it up this time, though, and after a few minutes Frank left them alone, to stir their coffees and dig into their breakfast. No, Everett thought, watching his son load ketchup next to his home fries and cut sausages with his fork, Cam wasn't morose, he was thoughtful.
(Praise the Lord. It was about damn time.)
They indulged in a little Monday-morning quarterbacking, as Everett's truck climbed into the mountains up the Blue Ridge Parkway. This time, at least, Cam didn't mention private boxes and VIP suites, and it was almost like the old days of radio football and a son unspoiled by more worldly pleasures than time with his dad.
Pulling into the old house was always like stepping back in time. It wasn't far from the new house in Montreat as the crow flew, but the only track between the two had grown over fifty years ago, and now it was fifty miles around the mountains to get to. The old house was newer than the new house, since it'd been constructed by Ezekiel Mitchell when he ran off into the hills after having a bad war in Europe, and the new house predated it by sixty years. The backward appellation came when his father died ten years later and he and his wife moved down to take over the family clanstead, leaving theit old house behind them. Other than the time Everett and two of his brothers had patched up the roof in the seventies, the alteration to the steps when he'd lost his legs, and the yearly cleaning of eaves Carter felt it was his duty to perform, the house hadn't been improved since Ezekiel moved out. The Mitchell women who came to hunt here in increasing numbers and saw chaos and disarray in that comfortable old hunting shack were firmly ordered to stick to their knitting, and only clean out what encouraged critters or mold. The old house was tradition, and tradition was comforting.
Everett's gear was all loaded into a backpack he could slip on before sliding his hands into his canes, which left Cameron carrying the perishable foodstuffs and his own bags. Everett looked up from fussing with his backpack to watch his son, and a small frown creased his forehead. Now that Cam's earlier vim and vigour were dampened somewhat, Everett could look past his bright expression and frenetic movements to notice that he looked a little... unsteady. He hid it well, of course, planting his feet squarely before lifting the milk crate full of food out of the truck bed and putting a hand against a porch post on his way up the shallow stairs, but Everett found cause to worry that his son's miraculous recovery might not have been a complete miracle after all.
He didn't mention it, though. It'd been years since he'd gone hunting, but Everett knew that the trick to a proper stalk was to stay as quiet as you could, and not to make any sudden moves.
So they spent two days in peaceful quiet, as the leaves were burnished the colour of sunshine and the mists never quite burned off. On the second morning Everett got up to put coffee on, and saw a deer standing ten feet from the front of their porch; by the time he'd turned around to tell Cameron, something had spooked it, and it was gone.
Cameron came to talk that afternoon. Everett was whittling on the porch swing with a stick of birch that wasn't quite sure yet what it wanted to be, and he made sure not to do more than glance up from his work as his son came and settled next to him. Restless without work of his own, Cameron did his best not to really fidget. He looked out at the woods that encroached ever closer on the front lawn, as though his contemplation would fool his father into not noticing that he hummed with energy.
"Dad," Cameron finally said, once he'd pretended to be quiet long enough, "I need some advice."
Everett kept his eyes down, knife and fingers probing a knot in the wood. "You know I'll always give it to you, son."
Cam clasped his hands together, and blew out a breath. "No, I don't need advice. I just need..." He turned his head and pressed it to his arm. "I think that I am seeing some things being done, that just aren't right. And I think..." This was a pause Everett watched his son for. "Dad, What if something that's right for the country, just isn't right in general?"
He didn't have a clue what was really going on in Washington, but he knew exactly what his son was asking. It was something he'd wrestled with himself, more times than he could count.
Sometimes, later, he told himself his answer was selfish. Sometimes he thought it was cruel. In his heart, he always knew it was right.
"I don't think," Everett answered slowly, "that we truly know what's good for the country. Could be, in twenty, fifty years' time, they'll look back on us and wonder what the hell we all were thinking. I think, Cameron, that the best any of us can hope for is that they'll look back and say, we did the best we knew how, and gave everything we could for it."
"Yeah," Cameron said, and blew out a breath that might have had a laugh behind it. "Yeah, Dad. You're right." Then he looked out at the trees, and laughed again. "God help me."