Chapter Three: Holes in the Ground

"Pa, we gotta talk about Adam."

Looking up from the ledger on top of his desk, Ben gazed upon his middle son with guarded eyes. "What did he do?" he asked tiredly.

Shaking his head, Hoss's internal conflict was clear. He didn't like tattling on his older brother. Always acting as protector and confidante, he was more inclined to help clean up the fallout from Adam's very sporadic misdeeds than tell outright. The fact that he was standing in front of his father's desk now was proof of the seriousness of this particular transgression.

"It ain't what he did," Hoss said. "It's what he didn't do."

Exhaling heartily, Ben tossed his pencil atop the ledger, leaned back in his chair, and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was certain he felt a headache coming on, a specific dull throbbing that seemed to follow swiftly after someone said his oldest son's name. It was never indicative of anything good—at least not anymore.

Adam never talked about what had taken place the fateful evening Ben had come to think of as the one with the rope-tying incident, why he had reacted the way he had, or the seemingly brutal memories that had been awoken by that rope. He wouldn't talk about it, but that didn't mean the night hadn't affected him. He was often quiet and moody, difficult to speak to and impossible to please. His sleep was occasionally intermittent, ravaged with nightmares so powerful he would yell himself awake and then take to stalking the distance in front of the fireplace for the remainder of the night.

"I just want to be alone, Pa," he would say when Ben would try to join him to await the morning light.

Ben was always tempted to state the obvious. Whether Adam realized it or not, he was never alone. There was a time when such a statement would have been made in connection to his relationship with his father, or brothers; now it was decidedly indicative of something else.

Though he never wanted to, Ben would leave his son to his pacing, dull and solid footsteps that seemed to echo throughout the great room. The noise wasn't loud enough to travel upstairs to bother his brothers. Still, it was nothing short of a miracle that they didn't awaken Hop Sing. Or maybe they did and the man had taken to coping with Adam's disruptive behavior the same way the rest of the family had. Anything non-threatening was ignored; any complication born from Adam's new outlook on life that had to be acknowledged was dealt with as carefully and quietly as it could be.

"You know that herd that needed to be moved to a new pasture weeks ago?" Hoss asked.

"The one Adam said he would take care of?" Ben's stomach turned, his mind already making the connection his son had yet to voice. "He didn't move them, did he?"

"No, sir. He did not. The cows picked that stretch of land clean. Of course, that ain't even the worst part of the whole deal. Them plants will grow back in time. The cows on the other hand, ain't gonna magically rise from the dead. There was another reason why they needed to be moved; they were getting a little too close to that dried up gully for comfort."

"They fell in."

"Some of 'em did," Hoss affirmed. "As far as I could tell most of them were smart enough to avoid it. They scattered and found themself new grazing land. I came upon that grouping this morning in pasture they had no business being upon. That's what led me to check up on the rest and discover what I did. Three dead in all, Pa. I know that ain't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but…" Shrugging, he didn't finish the sentence.

"It's certainly not nothing."

"It ain't," Hoss said. "I don't know if you wanna talk to Adam about it, or if it's even worth risking the fight to bring it up." He appraised Ben carefully, his brows knitting with concern. "But the fate of that herd ain't exactly the strangest part of what I got to tell you. Adam may not have moved them cows, but he was for sure spending a great deal of time up there."

"Why would he go up there, if not to move the herd?"

"I found a shovel and a whole mess of holes that've been dug into the land."

"Holes?"

"A whole lot of 'em. Most of them are small, almost like they were supposed to be the start of somethin' but then weren't and had to be moved on from. It's strange, Pa. It ain't the kinda diggin' a man does without purpose."

"Why would Adam dig holes?" Ben asked. The question and the story that prompted it felt too bizarre to be real. "That doesn't make any sense."

"You're telling me," Hoss said. "Why wouldn't he move them cows if he was going up there? At some point, he was bound to see they had gotten stuck, a problem he could have rectified instead of ignored. Like I said, it's strange. I just thought you oughta know."

In the days that followed Ben wanted to bring up the herd and the holes. Every time he laid eyes on his oldest child, he couldn't find the right words. It was just too odd to picture Adam doing such a thing, the behavior so irreconcilable with the man he knew. There had to be a mistake or a misperception on Hoss's part, and if that was the case then it was better not to bring it up; Adam was moody enough as it was. It was easier not to talk about it, and, as time passed, it became easier to pretend it hadn't happened at all.

Moving forward, Ben directed his two younger sons to handle tasks where livestock was concerned. He tasked his eldest with overseeing a group of men they had hired to fell trees. Adam had always enjoyed slipping into the role of foreman on timber operations, and overseeing men was a strength of his. With a hefty contract due to be fulfilled at the end of the upcoming month, Ben silenced any faint doubts and assigned Adam to oversee the project. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, this decision was a gamble that would not pay out in the end. It caused much more harm than good, and next it was Little Joe who would come to speak to his father about his oldest brother.

"Pa, we have to talk about Adam," he said. Hands planted firmly on the top of Ben's desk, he leaned over and cast his father an exasperated look.

"What did he do?"

"You know that crew we hired to fulfill that timber order?"

"Yes."

"He fired them."

"Fired them?"

"Every last one of them."

Ben pinched the bridge of his nose, his headache returning full force. "When?"

"Judging by the fact that every tree we marked to be felled is still standing, I'd say pretty much right after you hired them."

"Every tree is still standing," Ben repeated evenly. This was not the best of news. In fact, it was the worst that had been shared with him in a while. The crew was supposed to have been working for three weeks now. What on earth had Adam been doing for all that time?

"We're not gonna make that order, Pa," Joe said. "We could double the number of men we hired for that first crew and work them day and night and we still wouldn't meet the deadline, and besides…" He paused. "We can't cut that grouping anymore, anyhow," he added carefully. "Adam might not have been felling trees, but he's been spending time up there, alright. He dug holes in between the trees; some are deeper than others, but they all destroyed what stable footing could be had on that land. We can't cut that stretch now, at least not how it is. We got to get a crew to fill in the holes, make the land safe to stand on before we can even begin to think about getting after those trees. I think we're gonna have to back out of the order."

"We'll do no such thing," Ben said. "You and Hoss head into town, gather up as many men to work as you can. Promise them whatever wages you must, but make sure they know how hard of a job they're in for and that we need a quick turnaround. I'll ride out and mark a new grouping. If there's one thing on this land we don't have a shortage of it is trees."

Pulling himself off the desk, Joe stood and nodded. "Sure thing, Pa," he said. "But what about Adam?"

"What about him?"

"Well… are you purposely excluding him from being involved in the completion of a job that was his to begin with?" There was no malice or resentment lurking behind the question; Joe seemed genuinely curious about the answer.

Ben waived his hand dismissively. "Leave him be for the time being."

"We could use his help on this. Every man we can get to lend a hand is gonna count."

"I said leave him be," Ben said firmly. He had enough problems to handle without adding his hole-digging, temperamental first-born son into the mix.

Adam may have caused the situation, but it was a problem his family would fix without him. Though it took every able-bodied man in the territory they could hire, and hard, long days that stretched into equally long and hard nights, they fulfilled the contract. And when it was all over Ben, Hoss, and Little Joe finally returned to the ranch house to find their extended absence had either gone overlooked or ignored outright by Adam. He made no mention of it, or the trees he had been tasked with clearing, or the patch of others that had been taken in their place. He was bound to be aware of it—one way or another. A job that big and swift wasn't completed without a certain amount of ruckus or attention.

It wasn't that Adam didn't know, Ben realized quickly. It was that he didn't care. He had other things on his mind. Like memories of things he wouldn't dare talk about, and digging himself bigger and deeper holes.

Ben resigned himself to speak with Adam about those holes. He really had intended to, but he was tired after the lumber-cutting sprint, his body feeling a little too old and sore. He had gone to bed determined to have a long serious conversation with his son the next morning. But the problem with putting off things until tomorrow is that when the day finally arrives it presents itself as today, and the problem with owning a ranch is the list of tasks to be done was never complete. He awoke with a whole new crop of problems to solve, and in order of most pressing to least, Adam's strange hole digging was promptly designated to the bottom of the list.

The longer Ben put off talking about it, the more ludicrous the topic of conversation began to seem. Surely, Joe was embellishing the truth about the holes marking the land in between the trees. Given the stress of the situation, who could blame him for that? This was Adam they were talking about. Not anyone else. And as far as men went, he just happened to be the one person his father trusted the most. No, if Adam had been digging holes there was a good reason for it, and there was an even better one for why he had fired those men and failed to fell the trees, and an even better one than those two reasons put together for why he hadn't moved that herd. Ben just didn't happen to know what any of these reasons were—or if he wanted, or even needed to know.

What did it matter if a man wanted to spend his time digging holes, anyway? It wasn't like Adam was doing any real harm. Well, financially speaking, he had done some harm. There was the loss of the three cattle and then there were the inflated wages they had paid their replacement timber team. So, no damage outside of that. And, well, the damage to Adam's hands maybe. He was bound to have blisters and calluses by now—that was if he wasn't wearing gloves, which Ben reasoned with as much digging as he was doing, he probably was. Adam was, after all, intelligent enough to foresee the need for such things.

For a man who had spent his whole life following rules and following through, who could really blame Adam for faltering this once? For wanting to spend his time doing something he wanted to rather than what was needed from him? What was the harm in digging holes? And now that

Ben knew it was what his son intended to do, he could divert him toward stretches of land where such a thing was useful.

He put Adam in charge of digging fence posts on a particularly flat stretch of land beyond the back of the house where Hop Sing had grown a large vegetable garden. The man had been after Ben to build a fence around it for months as word of the plethora of budding, alluring vegetables had made the rounds among the local four-legged scavengers. The timing seemed perfect; the task fitting for Adam's current digging mood. It was such a foolproof plan. There was no way it could fail. Until, of course, the day that it did, and then it was a disgruntled Hop Sing lingering on the opposite side of Ben's desk.

"Let me guess, we need to talk about Adam," Ben said flatly. "He's been digging holes in places you don't want him to."

"Father know?" Frowning, Hop Sing's displeasure over the notion was clear. "Adam destroy garden," he said heatedly. "Dig in wrong place! Vegetable ruined!"

"I didn't know," Ben assured tiredly. Impulsive and veiled, the statement had been uttered as an attempted joke. There was nothing funny about it being confirmed. A telltale pounding on the side of his head was beginning to make itself known.

"Father know," Hop Sing said. His dark eyes were accusing, making Ben wonder if the sentence had been purposely shortened, or if it was yet another whose additional words had been lost in translation. "Make stop."

"I intend to."

The assurance wasn't a lot, but it was enough. Ben leaned back in his chair, his hand finding its way to the side of his now throbbing head as Hop Sing left him to consider his apparent problem alone.

The problem itself wasn't as apparent as one would think. It wasn't so much that Adam had remained determined to dig holes, rather his father's hesitancy to speak about it. Ben didn't want to acknowledge or talk about it. He wanted to ignore it until the behavior somehow corrected itself, Adam's new-found favorite hobby becoming no more than a silly distant memory once its purpose was finally served.

But what was its purpose, anyhow? What was Adam hoping to find? Or not find, rather. Maybe the action of digging was more soothing than the finished product would ever be. That, Ben thought, was a suspicion that finally made sense, because with all the bad this hole-digging had caused, he couldn't deny it had brought some good.

Seemingly no longer tortured by nightmares, Adam had given up pacing in front of the fireplace during the night. He was sleeping much better, which had a direct impact on his moods. They were no longer unpredictable or foul. Of course, no one would have accused him of being the talkative type as of late. Still, he seemed better than he had been in a while.

Maybe this hole digging was more therapeutic than the rest of them would ever know. Maybe it was Adam's way of processing the memories that had begun to creep up after the rope-tying incident. His way of thinking things through. And wasn't that the way things always were with Adam? He was fine right up until the moment he suddenly wasn't, and then he stalked about, hurt, broken, and brooding, right up until the moment he was suddenly fine again and things went back to normal. He never talked about the things that hurt him—even as a boy, he had never really done that. He had always preferred to work things out on his own. Well, maybe this hole digging was just his way of doing that. In which case, his father was not eager to draw attention to the strangeness of an action that seemed to bring his son so much peace.

Ben expelled a hearty exhale and winced as the breath seemed to intensify the pain residing in the side of his head. Hand falling to rest upon his lap, he leaned forward and pulled open one of the desk drawers, procuring an envelope of powder Doc Martin had long prescribed. Clenching it in his hand, he rose with a groan and made his way to the staircase to retire to bed.

Maybe tomorrow he would speak with Adam about the holes—maybe the cattle and the trees and the garden too. Perhaps tomorrow would finally seem like the ideal day in which to do all of that.

TBC