Where do I even start with Ruth?
We've had nothing but time and space out here, and maybe she can sense how much I yearn to understand.
As we walked, she spoke.
Told me that she didn't start believing in God until after she died.
I laughed, because I thought it was a metaphor. It wasn't.
"There was a grave for me. In Goodsprings. Cross and everything. I stood over it for a long time."
There's a thought: anti-resurrection. Her God didn't raise her. Maybe he just let her look.
Then she told me about the divide. Not even the wildest rumors could have prepared me for the reality of who she'd been before the bullet.
It doesn't even make sense. It can't make sense.
How could the NCR have been so ignorant, so foolish in handing her that package from Navarro and directing her to deliver it to the one place it could unleash horrors?
Could it have been...
Why do I hesitate to write this, even now? I hate how plausible it feels, how familiar. I'm no stranger to my father's atrocities back that which is rightfully ours.
I tried to reason with her, to rationalize. Maybe she hadn't done it. Maybe she didn't know what she was carrying. Maybe it wasn't her fault.
She quoted doctrine in response, looked at me like I'm missing something critical.
I looked it up, after.
The rebellious shall be pierced with much sorrow; for their iniquities shall be spoken upon the housetops, and their secret acts shall be revealed.
She told me that people lived in the Divide. Families. A community that prospered, that governed itself. If they were fortunate, they met a brutal end. If they weren't, they remain. That they mattered.
Said something else, too. Talked to me about Joshua. Told me that she made it throughknowingbecause of him.
I already knew about what little is left of the New Canaanites, the tribes, and the man who brought about their downfall finding redemption from them all the same. It still seems impossible. The things he's done... yet she says his name like it means safety. Speaks his doctrine like reason.
I don't think I've ever said my father's name out loud. Decades later, I can barely grapple with his evil, much less my jumbled feelings about it. Yet here she is, refusing to look away from the worst within herself.
What does it mean to carry something like that, and allow yourself to be unburdened?
It gives me more context to her gravity. The way people defer to her, even though she doesn't demand it. Like she's already paid the price of leadership in full.
There's something else that's scratching at the back of my mind, thinking about that package. The ration bars from the bunker. There's no date stamp, but I found a torn and faded fragment of a sticker on one. It could be the end of a date, it could be nothing. 269.
I haven't said anything. I want to protect Johnson and Judah from the possibility that they were passed over yet again. I checked every single bar we brought with us after that, nothing.
Lastly… Daisy. All this talk about graves. It's all I can do not to break when I think about where we left her. No headstone, no grave marker, no funeral, no eulogy. Empty words. She is alone. It isn't enough.
I'm exhausted. Ruth says she expects we'll reach the Virgin River tomorrow, although she doesn't know how far up the river we might have to travel to find them. There's something in her silences as she stares down the endless road that unsettles me.