Hi all, here we are the penultimate chapter, almost at the end and the chapter length does kind of reflect that, next chapter will be short too, as short and sweet as this note.

But on a more serious note thank you all so much for your continued support.

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Guardians And Gladiators

Chapter 13-Good Day For It.

John-Boy comes home and he knows that there is a story to write here. He just has to figure out how to put it on paper. Penultimate Chapter of this story. Slightly shorter chapter.


He was tired.

He was bone achingly tired. Like he had just been ran over by the trunk tired. Like when he had had to do his entrance exams straight after surgery and he had gone back to that horrible hospital bed and slept for what felt like a week until he could open his eyes without seeing scars and feeling dizzy.

That had been the best time of that whole nightmare week. That deliciously sleepy feeling that he had clung to whenever he had needed to get away from the looks that he was being given. In his sleep he didn't dream. In his sleep he didn't have nightmares and when he was asleep back then he didn't have to worry about his entrance exams which had been the gift that had just kept on giving.

(Thank the good Lord—reverently—that he didn't have to do them again. Once you were in college you were in. If he'd have to do them every year to keep his place he might have to throw up. Already he was so, so tired of exams)

But the point was that he was tired, not in his mind but in his body. As he got out of the hospital he found that his mind was running one hundred miles an hour and his body was achingly slow at keeping up. There was nothing that he could do to get the two working together again.

It was a slow recovery.

He knew. He had been there before. Remember?

But as his Daddy helped him out the truck and he had to bite back the whimper at the pain that shot up his side he thought that the last thing he wanted to do, despite the tiredness that was pulling at him with every step that he took, was sleep.

He wanted to write instead.

No.

He needed to write.

He needed to play out the story in his head and so he did. He imagined it.

He needed to sit down and pull a fresh piece of creamy paper towards him, he needed a fresh pen and some ink that had just been opened so it was all black and dark as the night sky. He needed some peace of mind so that he could sit at his desk and look out down the driveway to where the road met the mountain and the warmth of his home met the darkness that was night upon Walton's Mountain. And he needed it like he needed air. He needed to be at his desk and to sit down and to write and to record and to try and understand just all that had happened since that picnic all those weeks ago. It had only been a fortnight but it felt like decades. But he could not do that, so he laid in bed and tried to think about how he would write the story instead.

And what a story it was. It was etched upon his parents faces, in the way his Grandpa could barely look at him, in the way that his brothers and his sisters carried themselves, no longer children but adults who had come close to understanding that man could take away land and kin could also take the life of their own. It was written in the way that Wade had held himself when he had come into see him and John-Boy had wanted to say that it was all going to be alright but he knew that for Wade at least it was never going to be alright again. Wade was trapped in an unhappy marriage to a woman who was pregnant with his child and yet who constantly berated him for not being the man that she wanted. There was no scenario in which, when he looked at the weight of the world on Wade's shoulders, did he think he could write Vera as sympathetic. She was the conundrum in this story, the thing he couldn't visualise a happy ending for. He wanted Wade to be happy. He just did not think he could write the story where Wade was happy with Vera.

Not when Vera's version of the happy ending had her husband's brains shattered all over the road and her in a county lock up and her baby taken away from her and placed in a home.

John-Boy suspected that when she had been envisioned their great defiance she had not foreseen that ending.

It was beyond insane.

Martha Corrine he could write about with some sympathy. He knew that many in his family might disagree. That there was a lot of them going up the mountain at the end of the week to make sure that she was following through on her word and that she was leaving and instead not rearming for another fight.

But it would be a man with a heart of stone who would look at that frail, indomitable woman and see her as anything other than a victim of change. The change that they all needed to get themselves out of the Depression, the change that the country needed. John-Boy was not naïve. In a country where a man would almost sell his children for work and food and firewood he knew that the construction of this highway had created hundreds if not thousands of jobs. He knew that the highway would have long lasting implications for the state. They were being dragged these backwoods mountains into the new world kicking and screaming. Progress and prosperity were new and dangerous things for a lot of people. And those pioneer people, the ones who had settled and never come down, for them change was the scariest of all.

So when he looked at that frail old woman, bowed by time but not diminished in sprit he could not think that perhaps this was the blow that would kill her. That taking her away from that house and her way of life and her way of living would be the thing that would end her. When he had watched the woman with an education of plants, an education of the land and an understanding of the simple things that people scoffed at but what made the world go round, when he thought about her painstakingly copying out her letters and trying to put into words what her home meant to her he found that he could not feel anger towards her for the direction that he had taken but only a terrible kind of sorrow that it had, had to take that direction.

Boon was a character that you could not write with no direction. Boon was a creature all of himself and maybe that was why he liked him…well…liked him from afar. Boon he could not write a happy ending for in this story and he got the impression that Boon would not mind that either because Boon did not seem to want the happy ending that characters craved. Boon was a character where an ending could not be written and John-Boy wouldn't want to take that away from him.

So that was the major players really. Blake, Avery, the Marshalls, all of them were characters that didn't need fleshing out. They were background, they would pop up once and then they would pop up again maybe a bit towards the end and then they would go back to their homes, to their hotel rooms, to their lives. There was no interest in fleshing out those characters and he didn't want to waste time on them.

So that just left the other main players.

His family.

Grandpa who had apologised over and over again for a decision that had been entirely John-Boy's own. It had been his decision to go after his Grandpa that day. It had been a decision born out of a terrible kind of panic and a deep love and he had done his best to try and put that into words and yet at the same time he knew that it would take a long time for his Grandpa to move on from what had happened up on the mountains.

It would take even longer for his parents.

His Momma was doing a good job of pretending that she was not affected by it. His Grandma too. Jason had spoken to him only once, the mantle of manhood on his shoulders, he had told John-Boy what had happened at the hospital and it had been a great struggle not to rip his stiches out trying not to laugh in shock and then genuine amusement.

But Jason had insisted that they were not to speak to it. The fact that his Grandma of all people had smacked Boon across the face was something that he was sure would have been the legend of this mountain and would have made one hell of a story but Jason shushing as if he expected Grandma to descend from the ceiling like an angry dragon ready to punish them all for gossiping.

But it was from Jason that he knew that his Daddy and his Grandpa were at an impasse with their pioneer relatives. That the impasse might be there for a long time. Grandpa still considered Martha Corrine family and as far as their Daddy was concerned family was a word that should not be associated with them. Kin. Yes. Family. No.

John-Boy tried to think about that but his head hurt too much and so Jason had replaced his water glass patted him on the arm and had left.

That was another thing he did not know how to write. The change in his siblings, the change in each of them even Jim-Bob and Elizabeth (though he was pleased to see that the change in them was minimal). It was the change in Jason and Mary-Ellen that scared him the most because that change in them was so glaring obvious. They had gone from the terrible teenage years to young man and woman and to him it didn't seem right that his shooting was the thing that had brought about that change.

But it was clear in the way that they held themselves. And now that was another headache that he didn't need. If he was to write a story about Jason and Mary-Ellen now he was going to have to write them as adults and he didn't know how to do that. In so much of his work the younger ones had always been that, the younger ones, the children etc, etc, etc.

Growing up was a terrible thing.

But at least he had company.

Ike came round once or twice, the Sherriff came round to see him, Miss Mamie and Miss Emily came round with their usual jar of recipe that went back out with them with the usual disapproving expression on his mother and grandmother's face and the usual giggling from his grandpa in that way that only the Baldwin sisters could rise within him.

By the end of the first week he felt like he had put the pieces together as much as he could.

And more importantly by the end of the first week he could get out of bed, get dressed and get downstairs to breakfast with minimal assistance and that was a great victory in his mind and he was damn well proud of it.

It was there that he heard his Grandpa tell his Daddy that Martha Corrine would be leaving in the morrow.

"I want to go" he said flatly. "I want to go" he said again into the silence. "I need to go and see them, I need to put it together in my mind"

He looked his Daddy straight in the eye when he said this. He needed his Daddy, that great and wonderful man, that great and wonderful figure in his life to understand this. To understand the reasoning behind this or at the very least to accept it.

Until he became a father he would never understand that look in his Daddy's eye. John-Boy when he had stopped being John-Boy later on and became John Walton Jr would know what it meant. He would know what it meant to look at your son and see him become a man all over again.

But he didn't.

Not then anyway.

"Alright son" his Daddy said quietly "But you take Jason with you"

Jason didn't even debate it, instead he just nodded his head.

John-Boy turned back to his porridge and attacked it with more vigour and hunger than he had done before.

There was a story here he knew there was.

He just had to figure out how to write it.

And he would.

He knew he would.


And there you are, see you all next time which hopefully will be soon.

Next Chapter-THE FINAL CHAPTER-John Boy goes up to the mountain to reflect on the end of the Walton's pioneer past and what comes next.