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Chapter 14: Resolutions

Across the broken miles I'll fly
with hope in my wings,
a prayer on my lips,
and a heart which sings
to find your footprints in the sand.
-the author

The seagulls were restless in the morning sun. Enos could see them from behind his bedroom window, careening on the wind and soaring and diving down to the surf. The bright light made his eyes water, and the muscles along his shoulders and down his back ached; a consequence of sitting at his desk at the station until 3:00am trying to organize the notes surrounding the county's two unsolved murders.

He fell back onto the bed and looked up at the knotholes in the paneled ceiling. As a boy, his mind would have turned them into the eyes of monsters staring down at him, and he wouldn't have been able to sleep after imagining their teeth, sharp as needles, gleaming in the moonlight. It was mornings like these he wondered where all the years had gone.

He ground the sleep out of his eyes and pulled himself up to get dressed. The past was gone, and it was time to put it behind him. If he needed a distraction, it was waiting for him in a box at the station. There had been no easy answers in Chicago - only more questions, and those had taken second fiddle to Uncle Jesse and the funeral.

It was time to get to work and prove there was more to Enos Strate than a bumbling country deputy or a target for gang bullets.

Luke had called a family meeting and, while Daisy knew what it must be about, she still found it difficult to meet his eyes. The sounds of the night drifted in through the screen door; cicadas and spring peepers making the silence between the three of them less heavy. June bugs banged against the window, attracted by the light.

It didn't seem right to be gathered around the table without their uncle. Daisy smoothed her hand across the faded checks of the tablecloth, wishing she could have just one more memory back of being together. The loss of her aunt grew harder again with the loss of Uncle Jesse and the trauma surrounding his death. She knew that whatever Luke's decision was, it would separate the three of them. Either he would be leaving them to make his own way in the world, or he would stay and resent the fact that he couldn't follow his dreams.

She desperately hoped for the former, no matter how difficult losing him would be.

"I guess y'all are wondering what it is I wanted to talk to you about," Luke began, setting aside the folded piece of paper he had been holding.

"I wish you'd just say it, Luke," muttered Bo, "instead of beating around the bush. You've got me more worried than a grub worm in a chicken coop."

"Yeah, well, the fact is, there ain't no easy way to say what I need to talk about."

Daisy thought if he took anymore time, she'd tell Bo herself. "Just start at the beginning."

Luke sighed and tried again. "Back last fall, before Daisy had her accident, I mentioned to Uncle Jesse how I wouldn't mind going down to the Firefighter Academy down in Forsythe."

"Firefighter Academy?" Bo sat up straighter. "Wait a minute, I thought this was about...well, just nevermind."

"Uncle Jesse and Daisy, though she don't remember it, convinced me to send in an application. I plum forgot about it since then, what with all that's happened. Plus, I reckon I never expected to get a response anyway." He ran his hand nervously through his hair. "I got a letter week before last." He unfolded the paper and lay it on the table, smoothing out the creases. "I got accepted."

Bo looked confused. "Say, that's great, Luke!" he beamed. "Don't know why you were so worried to tell us. Shoot, Hazzard could probably use someone that actually knows what they're doin'. Ever since Amos retired, we ain't had nothing but a volunteer bucket brigade."

Daisy shot a glance between the two of them, waiting, her palms sweaty. Here would be the impasse, when Bo realized that this meant they would be losing Luke.

"It ain't like that, Bo," cautioned Luke, in a tone that he usually saved for softening bad news. "It ain't just a class, it's a school, and after that I don't know where I'll end up. Boss had to pay Amos, being fire chief and all, but that was back before he retired. Everyone in Hazzard's volunteer. You know Rosco ain't gonna pay me."

Bo's chair scraped against the floor as the realization hit him like a 2x4. "You don't mean you'd be leavin'!?"

"Now, Bo," Daisy interrupted, "ain't nobody got a right to hold Luke back from what he wants to do, least of all us. We're family, we oughta be behind him. Uncle Jesse always said we should-."

"What d'you know, Daisy?" Bo demanded, hurt, "you don't even remember half of what Uncle Jesse said! He also said we was to stick together!"

She shot up, not expecting such callous words from her younger cousin. "How dare you, Bo Duke! I oughta-"

"Stop it you two!"

She turned back to Luke, but Bo stormed away to look out the window, slamming his hands down on the sink.

"This is why I wasn't even gonna say anything, Daisy," Luke told her, gesturing towards Bo. "I can't very well keep this family together by gallivanting off to school."

Luke picked up the paper and shoved it in his pocket and was just about to walk away when Bo turned back around with tears in his eyes.

"No, stop Luke. I'm sorry." He looked over at her and shook his head. "I owe you an apology, too, Daisy. I don't think I've ever said something so dang mean in my whole life as I just did to you."

Daisy walked over and put her arms around him. "It's alright, Bo."

"Daisy's right, Luke. One thing Uncle Jesse never did was shoot down our dreams, and I reckon there was plenty of times he wanted to. Me driving in that Carnival of Thrills jump for one. It's not about you thinking of leaving us, Luke. It's..." Daisy hugged him harder, burying her face against his shoulder "...it's everything changing so dang fast. I know it has to, but..."

She heard the chair and footsteps, then Luke's arms were around both of them. She knew, without seeing, that there were tears in his eyes as well as her own, as she slipped her other arm around him. Seconds stretched into a minute, then two, as they mourned together over all they had lost. No one could really understand but them, and the weeks of avoiding each other had taken their toll and prevented them from beginning to heal.

It's going be alright, she thought. Not now, but someday - because of this moment - it will all be okay.

At last, they moved apart, wiping red eyes. Bo grinned at them as they sat back down. "I guess I've got some news myself," he said, sheepishly, "though it ain't near as exciting as yours."

"News? Well, let's hear it, Bo," urged Luke. "You ain't asked Cindy Lou to marry you, I hope."

Bo shot him a disgusted scowl. "Luke, have you taken leave of your senses? I ain't asked her out since February."

"That explains why she joined a convent," he muttered.

"I know you two could go on like that all day," said Daisy, batting at Luke, "but I'd actually like to hear what he has to say."

Bo lowered his eyes, and shook his head. "Well, like I said, it ain't exciting or nothing. I've just been doing some thinking." He glanced up at Luke. "Mabel Harris asked me if I'd be interested in buying their land."

This was the first Daisy had heard on the subject, and she could tell by the look on Luke's face that he was surprised as well. Mabel was the widow of Ralph Harris, who had passed away at the ripe old age of ninety-six back in January. Their 220 acres abutted the Duke property on the north side.

"I said I'd take it."

Luke whistled. "That's a hell of a lot of land."

"I went down yesterday and signed the deed," said Bo. He held up his hand for Luke to wait. "I used part of what Uncle Jesse left me to buy it, but she practically gave it away because she wanted it to stay with locals."

Luke looked at the man as though he'd grown horns and sprouted an extra leg. "Don't know what we're gonna do with it."

"Well, it turns out you ain't the only one who's been thinking about the future," Bo told him. He paced the length of the table, while she and Luke shared confused glances. "I know we grew up complaining about all the chores around here, but the fact of the matter is...well..." He stopped and turned back to them. "I've decided to keep up the farm. More than that, I've decided to try my hand at some real farming."

"Farming!" Luke laughed. "Bo, the most we ever did was grow corn for making moonshine or hay for Maudeen. I don't know the first thing about farming for a livelihood, and you don't neither!"

"You're right, Luke," he admitted. "I don't right now, but there's real money in it if you've got the land. I was talking to Jake Miller down at Ruebottom's the other day about hiring some help to build another barn. He says plenty of old-timers wouldn't mind giving me pointers to help me get started. I'd have to rent the equipment in the beginning, but I know how to run it all after those summers working in Mr. Hatcher's fields. There's still time to plant soybeans if I can get it tilled in time."

Bo's face lit up while talking about it, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Daisy almost pinched herself to see if this was all some weird dream.

Luke was looking at him as though he'd never seen him before. "You're really serious about this, aren't you, cuz?"

"I really think I can do it."

"Well...alright then," said Luke, resolved. "I thought I was the craziest one in this family, but I'm gonna hand that award over to you, Bo. The Academy don't start until the end of August, so me and Daisy will help you with whatever you need us to do." He grinned at her. "Right, Daisy?"

"Of course we will, sugar!"

She was happy for both of them. Really she was, but as Daisy watched Bo and Luke shake hands and laugh with each other, she wondered what kind of future would be left for her; a thirty-something who looked into the mirror every morning still surprised that she wasn't ten.

Enos felt Joy walk past, but ignored her until a fresh cup of coffee landed beside him. Papers full of notes and heavy tomes with cracked binding littered his desk. A Russian to English dictionary lay beneath them, and somewhere under it all were the pictures of Gino Spione. The book open in front of him was written in Russian, but it was the pictures he was interested in.

"Enos, you'll run yourself to an early grave staying up every night like this."

"This case won't solve itself, Joy. Thanks for the coffee."

He groaned inwardly as she dragged a chair over and sat down across from him. She was only twenty-six, far too young to be the Sheriff Department's 'den mother', but somehow she had ended up with that distinction. He supposed being the oldest of nine siblings and married to a guy who was forty-eight made her uniquely qualified.

"Are you alright?" She narrowed her eyes at him as she looked him over. "You've been like this since you got back from Georgia, and I know you've been sleeping here. Don't bother denying it."

"I'm fine, I just need to get these books back to the Chicago Crime lab before-" Her hand smacked down on the page in front of him, forcing his attention away from it.

"Everyone else says you don't lie, but I've figured you out," she said. "You lie by omission."

Enos rolled his eyes, realizing that he'd have to tell her something. He settled on a smidge of the truth. "I'm just realizing that I don't belong in Hazzard anymore, that's all," he told her. "I thought I'd always be able to go back and even if things had changed, I would still...belong, I reckon. I don't know, I'm tired. Don't listen to me, I'm just rattling on about nothing."

"Is this about Jesse Duke?"

Enos had given Joy a brief account of his childhood, not the moonshining part, of course, but enough for her to understand why Uncle Jesse's death had been so hard for him.

"No," he sighed. "Not really. It's still hard to believe he's gone, but...this isn't about him." She removed her hand, and he flipped to the next page of 'Tattoos of the Soviet Mafia and Their Meanings, Volume III', the rabbit hole down which his research had led him. "Gino's tattoos were common with the Soviet Mafia," he told Joy, "but I don't think he was an official member. Leaders in the mafia have those eye tattoos, but he was too young to have been high ranking. He must have gotten them in America since they weren't in the pictures of him from the prison in Hungary."

"Melinda mentioned you'd lost someone else," she said, ignoring his derailment of her subject. "Someone close to you."

He glanced back up at her. "You guys are worse than a bunch of old hens at a quilting party."

"I happened to ask her if she knew what was wrong with you. She didn't give any specifics." Joy waited for a response, but he had no intention of getting into a discussion over his non-existent love life, especially not at 12:45am. "I know how to keep my mouth shut about things that hurt," she told him, softly. "If you ever want to talk about it."

He knew she meant it. After all, he had known her for two years before he found out her husband had been a mariner, and not a conservation officer, most of his life. Bruce himself had told the story while ice fishing; on a dark, cloudy day, with snow threatening to fall heavy and thick. He had been captain of the commercial fishing tug, the October Sun, until a November storm had pushed it off course and over a reef just south of Thunder Bay. Before it sank, he and its five crewmen managed to clamber aboard an inflatable raft in 30 foot swells and subzero temperatures. Three of the men had frozen to death in front of him before they were rescued fourteen hours later by the freighter, John Morgan.

Still gives me nightmares, he had admitted. Enos knew the feeling.

"I know I can trust you, Joy."

"Can I ask her name?"

He pictured her face in the sun, as it was on the day he left. "Daisy," he murmured. "Her name was Daisy." His words seem to hang in the silence between them, and he knew by the stricken expression on Joy's face that he had given her the wrong impression and thought that Daisy had died. Why correct it, though? The Daisy he had known was dead. Or perhaps it was him who was dead to her.

It didn't matter anymore.

"I'm so sorry, Enos," she told him. "Is there anything else you need before I go?"

He shook his head. "Really, Joy, I'm alright. I promise I'll get some sleep in a little while; the cot in back is plenty comfortable. See you tomorrow."

She frowned at him, but stood and moved the seat back against the wall before grabbing her jacket from its hook. The door creaked as she pushed the bar and left him to his thoughts.

Daisy had tossed and turned for two hours but sleep still eluded her, even after a warm glass of milk. She lay on her stomach, listening to the wind buffet the house and the limbs of the maple tree creak outside the window. She felt as though she had left something undone, but she couldn't think of what it was.

She rolled onto her side and stared at the clock. Almost 1:00am. The air was humid and sticky, but the rain which had threatened to fall since evening had not materialized, and the box fan in the corner of her room provided little relief.

She thought about Bo's plan for farming and grinned, imagining the look on Uncle Jesse's face if he knew he'd given up his plans of driving for NASCAR for driving a combine. She prayed it would all turn out okay. With Bo using part of his inheritance to buy the Harris' property, the Dukes now owned 280 acres, and it was daunting to think of the work needed to be done to make it pay off before the end of summer. When she was little, Mr. Harris would rent his fields to local farmers, and beans and corn would spread out like a green ocean as far as she could see. Now that was all theirs...well, it was Bo's, she supposed.

The clock read 1:10am. "Oh for goodness sake, this is ridiculous!"

She threw off the covers and got up to turn on the light. In doing so, she remembered that she had neglected to write down the things she had learned about Enos from Art Sills in her journal. Kneeling down by her bed, she felt for the notebook in its hiding spot inside her bed's box spring.

It wasn't there.

Putting her eye to the hole, she peered inside. In the dimness, she thought she saw it on the far side of her bed where it had fallen off the wooden frame and onto the fabric cover below. Reaching her arm in as far as she could, she groped blindly until her fingers touched the edge of a book. She pulled in out, only to find that it wasn't her journal.

Or maybe it was? After all, the cover had Property of Daisy Mae Duke scrawled across the top in blue crayon and below it:

Private!
Keep out under penalty of death
that means you Lukas Duke!

When she came back home after the accident, all of her stuff had been taken away. The doctors had assured Uncle Jesse and the boys that it was better for her to start over, to remove the reminders of a life she could not remember. Instead of helping, it had made her feel like a stranger - not only at the farm and to her family, but to herself. The bits and pieces of information she had discovered about her past made no sense without the stories behind them.

How many times had she prayed that God would return just one memory to her? Here, in her hands, was a piece of herself; lost and found again. With with eager fingers, she opened the cover and began to read.

October 13, 1965...