THE LAST BOY

by ROBERT H. LIEBERMAN

“Having a baby is going to mean quite a change around here. I’m trying to envision him singing lullabies and changing diapers.”

  “He may even have to take off his gun when he comes home!”

  Thank God, thought Tripoli, Molly was again back in the mainstream, working and talking to people. What they needed now, he felt, was to get more sociable. Invite and get invited.

  They had Jerry Sisler and his wife, Tracy, out for dinner on a Friday evening. It was the payback for all the scrumptious dinners that Tracy had cooked for him while he was single.

  Tracy was a perky blond who sported lots of jewelry dangling from her neck and wrists, and had a tendency to bubble with talk.

  “This place used to be a wreck,” exclaimed Tracy as she took in all the remodeling that Molly and Tripoli had done since she last had been out to the farm—it was just before Tripoli's divorce. “I can’t believe this is the same house. I mean this place is amazing. It looks like a museum!”

  When they sat down to dinner, Tracy brought up the subject of the old books.

  “Books?” repeated Tripoli and looked hard at Sisler.

  “It's hardly a secret,” said Sisler with a shrug.“Everybody knows you have them. It's pretty obvious. Curly Donahue's been talking about it, and even I saw you carrying them out of the building.

  “Boy, Molly, this is great soup,” exclaimed Tripoli. “Got any more?” And, without waiting for a reply, he jumped up and dashed off to the kitchen.

  On the last Friday in January, they finally had Rosie and Ed out to dinner. Rosie looked washed out after the flu, but put on a cheerful face.

  All through the meal, Tripoli kept talking about his missing animals and the “rustlers.”

  “I think Trip is obsessing a little,” Molly joked.

  “Well, what do you expect?” said Rosie teasingly. “He's a cop, ain’t he? They always got to catch their crook. Hey,” she turned to Tripoli, “did you ever think it might be some poor, old, starving widow with six kids?”

  “Yeah, one who's got a taste for shish kebob,” Ed laughed with a full mouth.“Hmmm. This is good, Molly. What is it?”

  “It's a vegetable casserole. Danny always liked it.”

  “Daniel,” uttered Tripoli, and the mood at the table became somber. Outside, a coyote was baying into the night. The moon was nearly full and the land was bathed in an eerie white light. Almost in unison, all eyes went to the window.

  “Hey,” Ed said, suddenly breaking the silence. “Why don’t you rig up something?”

  “Huh?” said Tripoli.

  “I’m still thinking about the sheep.”

  “Yeah,” said Tripoli. “Right.”

  “You could make some kind of an alarm or something. You know, next time they come to swipe a lamb—boom!—you nail them.”

  “Hmmm…not a bad idea,” agreed Tripoli, lost in thought.

  “Hey,” said Rosie turning on Ed. “What are you, planning on joining the force or something? Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “I was just speculating. That's all.”

  “What do you want him to do,” asked Rosie, turning on her husband,“shoot some poor sucker because he takes a goat?”

  What Ed and Rosie, and especially Molly, didn’t know was that Tripoli was no longer certain that the animals were being stolen. What if they were just being reclaimed? His suspicions had been sparked shortly after the first goat went missing and grew as each new animal disappeared. It was almost too good to be true, and Tripoli decided to keep the notion to himself. He certainly didn’t want to raise Molly's hopes only to discover that the culprit was a thief after all.

  Was it possible that young Daniel had already learned enough from the old man to survive a winter in the woods alone? Tripoli was afraid to let on what he suspected, lest people start scouring the woods searching for the boy, driving him further away from the farmhouse and the animals he so desperately needed. However remote his theory, there was no way Tripoli could take that risk.

  A cop needed to deal in solid facts, not just speculation, Tripoli told himself, and he set to work on an alarm that night. It was a very primitive arrangement, nothing as sophisticated as a motion detector or an electronic switch. It was similar to what Tripoli had once concocted as a teenager to warn him and his brother when his parents were returning home on a Saturday night. He took a reel of fishing line, hooked it up to the barn door, and then led it into the downstairs living room. It was rigged up with a series of small pulleys so that when the barn door was opened, a tin can clanked to the floor.

  “You must be joking,” said Molly when Tripoli dragged a mattress and a gun—in case they really were being robbed—into the living room and settled in for the night.

  “I’m deadly serious,” he said.

  “Please, Trip, come back to bed. I don’t like sleeping alone.”

  “Well, come sleep down here with me then.”

  “Not on your life. And put that gun away. You’re going to end up hurting someone.”

  “I’m not going to shoot anybody—unless I have to. You want me to go out there in the dark without a weapon? What happens if the other guy's armed? Hey, we’re living out here in the boonies. I don’t want to scare you, but you never know what kind of nut is out there roaming around in these woods.”

  “I’m not scared. I just want us to go to sleep. Please, Trip.”

  “Just till I get the perp.”

  “How long is that going to take?”

  “As long as necessary.”

  It was cold on the floor—hard, too. Not anywhere near as comfortable as the queen-sized bed upstairs where Molly lay. But he slept at his post on Sunday night. Then on Monday. Then Tuesday and Wednesday.

  “Once you make up your mind about something…” Molly said over breakfast. She didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “Tenacity,” he said, solemnly shaking his head. “That's what makes a good cop.”

  “Great!” she said. “Enjoy yourself!”

  It wasn’t easy sleeping down there. He couldn’t quite let go and relax. He even slept with his clothes on, his shoes and gun strategically placed on the floor within easy reach.

  On Tripoli's birthday, they had dinner and then went to see a movie, some English period piece about virtue and virginity, and Tripoli slept through most of it. As they drove back, the night was moonless and it started to snow. The snow stuck, and, light and fluffy, the flakes kept tumbling down. Tripoli went to bed around midnight, exhausted from the long week of restless sleep, and fell into a deep, snoring slumber.

  Somewhere in the depths of the night, the can hit the floor with a loud clank. Tripoli awoke with a start, sitting up abruptly. Jumping to his feet, he forgot his gun and shoes, and in his rush to the door took a wrong turn and ended up walking blindly into a sharp corner. A second later, as the dullness turned to pain, he could feel a trickle of warm blood dripping down his face.

  Going back to the bed, he groped in the dark for his shoes, but couldn’t find them. He located his gun by stepping on it. By the time he got to the door, the can had already risen. The barn door was shut, and someone was moving off into the darkness.

  Tripoli scampered barefoot out into the snow. For a moment, he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. In the near distance, he could make out the figure of a stately old man with long, flowing hair and a beard. He had one of the ewes on a line and was trying to drag it forward. Behind the animal followed a smaller figure, a little boy, pushing. Tripoli stopped dead in his tracks. He stood riveted, his weapon dangling at his side, watching the slow procession advance through the scrim of falling snow. Tripoli was frozen by shock, and overcome by a deep sense of love…of relief. The old man was alive. And he was still there, watching over Daniel.

  As the faint figures began to move off into the woods, his feet suddenly felt cold and he stepped back into the shelter of the porch. Now he could tell Molly, he thought. How would he tell her? Should he wake her now? Turning to go in, he found himself face to f
ace with Molly standing in the darkened doorway.

  “Oh,” she gasped as she spotted the figures that were beginning to dissolve into the distant line of trees. She started to move, to chase out into the night after them, but suddenly caught herself and held back, holding on to one of the columns of the porch for support.

  Tripoli came up behind her. He slipped his arm around her waist, felt her shivering, and pulled her close. They stood there in silence long after the boy and old man had vanished into the night. Then, finally, they went back into the warmth of the kitchen, Tripoli closing the door softly behind them.

  For the longest moment they stood together in the darkness, holding each other.

  “The old Hermit's alive,” uttered Molly, shaking her head in disbelief. She could hardly see through her tears. “And Danny—he really is safe.”

  “And he’ll be back,” murmured Tripoli tenderly.

  “You think so?”

  “You’ll see. He’ll be back because he loves you and because he was meant to come back.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes. With all my heart. Daniel has a job to do. An important one.”

  Molly turned to look out the window. It was pitch black outside, and though she couldn’t see anything, she kept staring. “He's going to change the world, isn’t he?” she said, her eyes still fixed on the window.

  Tripoli nodded as he stroked her wet cheek.

  “Somehow, I’ve got to help him. And I keep wondering about what I should be doing? What I can do to lessen the harm that's been done? What would Danny want me to do?”

  “I think you’re doing it already,” he murmured.

  In the weeks that followed, Daniel did come back. March remained fierce and Molly, knowing that there would not be much food to gather in the deepening snow, left something in the barn each night. On occasion the food would sit there, accumulating for a few days, only to suddenly vanish. Wrapped in hay so they wouldn’t freeze, Molly left sacks of potatoes and onions, bags of nuts, and the casseroles and dishes that she cooked for Trip and knew that Danny would relish. She was dying to tell Rosie what had happened that February night, but Tripoli remained adamant.

  “Please, don’t mention this to anyone,” he had warned the morning after their discovery. He finished buttoning a crisp white shirt and then hunted for a tie with some green in it to match his pants. There was a break in the clouds and the sun was streaming into the bedroom.“Least of all Rosie.”

  “But that's not right! You know how much Rosie—”

  “Yeah, I know she loves Daniel, but she also loves to talk. If anybody finds out that he's here somewhere in the woods, this place will be crawling with people and they’ll push him farther away. Do you want that?”

  “No, but Rosie's been almost like a mother to him.”

  “Why take the chance?”

  Though she was bursting to tell, Molly kept their secret, contenting herself with the knowledge that Danny was safe and near at hand.

  Once when she went out to check in the morning, Molly found a series of small, clearly marked footprints in the snow leading from the barn. The poor kid was still wearing those sneakers she had bought him at the mall. In this weather his feet must be freezing, she thought, and hurried to town. Three days later, to her relief, the pair of lined hiking boots she had left were missing, and the next week when she again discovered small prints at the mouth of the barn, they bore the unmistakable tread of those new boots.

  “Just give him space,” Tripoli had counseled. But much as she tried, Molly often found that she simply couldn’t resist following those boot tracks. She pursued them as they wound up hills and plunged down into gullies, cut across open fields and snaked through dense forests. Sometimes they went for miles, but then she would discover that either the snow had blown over or Daniel had followed a running stream or they just mysteriously ended as if he had become weightless and taken off into the air. She felt a tinge of guilt tracking him as she did, knowing that if he wanted to see her, needed to see her, he could have done so without effort. It was just that she craved to see him, longed to touch him and hold him in her arms—if only for a moment.

  “You sound funny these days,” remarked Rosie when they spoke on the phone.“What's up?”

  “Funny?”

  “Just…well strange. It's like you’re hiding something?”

  “There's nothing to hide,” she sputtered.“Nothing at all. I’ve just been so darn busy with my column. People keep calling and writing.”

  “If you don’t want to talk, I’m not going to pressure you.”

  “Rosie, come on. You’re just imagining things,” she said, feeling terrible. It wasn’t quite so much a lie as an omission, Molly tried to console herself, but, in fact, she had erected a barrier between them which Rosie, her dearest friend, detected and which Molly abhorred.

  Molly baked and cooked for Daniel and the old man, attempted to anticipate what it was that they might need or desire to eat. She tried to imagine the old man biting into a piece of her homemade bread. Molly thought of the supplies as missives she was addressing to old Matthew. Surely by now he understood her message.

  “If you’re going out to the barn, take this, too,” she said as Tripoli pulled on his padded parka. It was a loaf of fresh bread, still warm and wrapped in a towel.

  “Hey, how do we know they’re not opening a store and selling this stuff?” he chuckled. He now had his arms heaped high with two new sleeping bags and a week's supply of food. And, as he stepped out into the wind-whipped winter evening, Molly tried not to think about Daniel in the cold but rather living in the warmth of the old man's love, living with the father he never had. But soon Daniel would have a brother or sister, and that, too, would change things. For the first time in her life, Molly truly looked to the future, prepared for what it had to offer and ready to embrace it.

  chapter twenty-four

  In the spring, Tripoli and Molly made a garden. Although it got warm early and flowers bloomed and migratory birds arrived weeks ahead of schedule, a driving wind kept blowing over their hilltop farm. It so threatened their seedlings that Tripoli hastily erected a barrier to shelter the fragile plants. Watering the dusty soil and babying the young plants brought to mind Daniel's prolific garden carved out of the unyielding soil around the trailer. By now, Molly was so big she found it hard to bend over: she weeded and thinned the beets and carrots crawling forward on all fours.

  “Hey, come on, Darling, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work anymore,” said Tripoli, stooping down so his face came level with hers.“Let me,” he whispered.

  “No, no, I like doing it.”

  “But the baby,” he said.“I don’t want anything to happen.”

  “Don’t worry,” she laughed, “I’ve been through this once before.”

  He kissed her brow and her lips. He tasted the salt on her neck, then he went back to work.

  Like a man possessed, Tripoli kept tilling the soil and expanding the garden, appending row upon row. He put in two dozen additional tomato plants, did five long rows of corn, placing them beside hills of squash and cucumbers. Then he made a second planting of beans, placing them in tight proximity to the corn. Close to the marigolds he clustered peppers and eggplants, cabbage and brussels sprouts, using the very methods of companion planting that he had seen Daniel employ in his tiny garden. When Molly wiped the sweat from her face to discover him stringing yet another line, she asked, “What are you planning to do? Feed the whole of humanity? We’re only two, you know.”

  “No, no,” he corrected. “Three. No four. No wait, five!” He laughed, then watched Molly as she returned to cultivating the row and thought how perfect the moment was. Together they had created something good and honest and lasting. Who would have thought it?

  Molly turned to catch him staring at her. “What are you looking at?” she asked, a half-smile on her face.

  “You, Darling. You.”

  May, June, July, an
d August were busy months for the two of them.

  Early each morning before heading into work, Tripoli was in the garden, harvesting the first crops, loading them into his new car to make his daily drop-off at the local soup kitchen and pantry run by the church.

  “Lou, these are absolutely amazing,” said the old priest, taking a fresh potato from the basket and hefting it in his hand. It must have weighed a good pound or more. While other gardens were being infested with insects or withering in the hot, driving winds, their garden was producing vegetables the size and taste of which were the talk of the town. “What's the secret?”

  “No secret at all. Just following some of Daniel's rules.”

  “Well, you’re making a lot of families very happy.”

  Molly was writing, but she was also traveling. She was given invitations to speak all around the state. She addressed government groups, women's clubs, unions—whoever wanted her to speak or was willing to listen. In the middle of her eighth month, so big she was hardly able to sit behind the wheel, she drove to Albany and spent two days meeting with state legislators.

  When she got back late that night she was beaming.

  “I met with the governor!” she exclaimed when Tripoli came out to help her in with her bag. “We had dinner!” She told Tripoli how she had spent three hours with the governor trying to convince him that he should lead a drive to resurrect the rail system, getting him to imagine a high-speed train running down the spine of the state; what it would do for the economy, what it would do for his image, how the history books would hail his efforts. “And there I was in the governor's mansion. Me. Molly Driscoll. A nobody. Having dinner with him! Just the two of us.”

  “Were there candles and soft music?” he asked, and she laughed. “I mean, maybe I should be jealous?”

  Her water broke early in the morning. It happened on the seventh of September, a good week before the doctors had planned to induce labor and do her C-section. The pains began only minutes later. The contractions were sharp and hard. They seemed far more intense than when she had started labor with Danny. Then she noticed she was bleeding. At first it was just a trickle, then it came in a steady flow, bright red, oxygenated blood running out of her.