Page 9 of Resilience

For Mason, watching all that had made him want a patch even more. He saw the club like an army, doing what they had to do to keep their people strong and well and safe. Sam saw that, too, but he also saw that, like an army, they were doing shit that put them and their people in harm’s way, which was why they needed to do some extreme shit to try to keep everybody they cared about safe.

He'd never had much ambition for anything else, however. In school, he’d gotten good grades, but he hadn’t had a favorite subject. It had all bored him about equally. Maybe English was a slight favorite, because he liked to read. When he was little and people asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he’d say about a hundred different things, none of them actual career interests, all of them inspired by whatever book he was reading. Like ‘lion tamer’ and ‘spaceman’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes.’

Even as he grew to adolescence, when everybody in school was thinking about college or jobs or whatever, he hadn’t been interested in any. He liked working with animals, and he was good at that, but he was already doing that. So he’d figured he’d stay on the farm and keep helping his mom take care of the place like he always had.

But then one Saturday early last summer, he’d been working the family produce shop, sitting on the porch rail during a rare lull and looking out over the Oklahoma countryside. All of a sudden, he’d been completely bored with that life, too. Since he’d finished high school, he’d spent so much of his life alone. In the fields or the stables, at the produce shop, wherever, he’d been alone so much.

He liked the quiet, for sure. But on that day, the quiet had wrapped around his neck and squeezed. He’d been lonely.

That was the first time he’d asked himself if he might want to prospect.

It took him most of that summer to figure out the answer: he wanted to be a Bull. Not for the wild parties, not for the adrenaline rush of dangerous work, not for the outlaw cred. But because he was lonely and wanted his family around him, and that was where they were: the clubhouse.

A year into prospecting, he still wanted that patch. He needed to be part of the brotherhood as well as the family. And he’d realized that the danger occasionally hunched over the clubhouse was in his life whether he spent Saturdays sitting on a rail at the produce shop or riding Russian guns to Mexican drug lords. Shit, the farm had been burned to the ground, and his grandfather with it, by club enemies before Sam was even born. He wasn’t saving himself or anyone else to steer clear of a patch. At least with a patch, he could fight back.

But damn, he did not want to have to wait the full two years for that patch. Currently, being around his family meant being bossed around, yelled at, given horrible jobs, and generally being treated like shit by people he loved. He wanted to get through prospecting as fast as possible.

Speaking of which, he mounted his bike—handed down from his father—and pulled his burner, making sure he hadn’t missed a call or text. Nope, all clear. Phew.

So ... should he go to Lark’s?

Thinking about it, he put his burner away and took out his personal. A text from Mom, asking him to run by the IGA on his way home and giving him a short list of things she wanted—all breakfast stuff, like cereal, pancake syrup, orange juice. He sent back a thumbs up so she’d know he was on the job.

No other messages. Usually Lark texted him like three times an hour, whether he could chat or not, but she’d been silent since he’d left her place hours ago. She was seriously pissed, too. Sam remembered that he’d pushed her away from the toilet pretty hard and maybe hurt her.

He felt bad about that. He’d never want to hurt a girl. But also, fuck. She’d been way out of line.

He needed to apologize for pushing her, and he needed to demand she never do something like that again. They needed to have this out. Which meant he needed to go over there so they could.

Staring at his personal, he sighed. Fuck.

Not tonight. He couldn’t deal with that drama tonight.

He put his phone away, fired up his bike, and headed to the corner of rural Oklahoma that was his home.

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~oOo~

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It was almost dark, only the last dregs of gloaming lightening the edges of the sky, when Sam arrived home.

Wesson Farms had been in his mom’s family for generations. After the fire that had destroyed most of the property and killed his grandfather, for whom Sam had been named, Mom and her brother, Gunner—also a Brazen Bull—had built up something new. Still the same farm, but now the home of both their families. Uncle Gun, Aunt Leah, and their kids, Aidan and Larissa, had a house about fifty yards away from where Sam lived with his parents and brother.

Mom and Uncle Gun owned the property jointly, but in practice everything but Gun’s house, garage, and the yard around it was Mom’s. She was the real farmer in the family.

She hadn’t started out that way. She’d gone to college, wanting to get free of the farm and the tiny town of Grant. But then her and Gun’s mother and brother—Gun’s twin—had been killed in a tornado, and Mom had dropped out of school and come home to take care of what remained of her family.

Sam had heard that story plenty of times, and he knew it was true. But it wasn’t so easy to believe even so. He couldn’t imagine his mom being anything but what she was: a farmer and all-around earth mother. She was woven and rooted into this place like the monster honeysuckle bush that was taking over the side of the stable.

Wesson Farms had been a real farm in prior generations, but since the fire it had been a much smaller thing. Most of the property was left wild, for the horses and goats to wander around in, for Sam and Mason to explore on foot, horseback, or ATV. Only a few fields produced, about thirty acres in all. Enough to feed their two-house family, fill the bins at the produce shop, and sell to a few markets in nearby towns.

That produce shop was open only in the mornings, Sunday through Wednesday, and all day Saturday, from late spring through the harvest. Mom had started it long ago, selling the overflow of the kitchen garden out of the back of her old station wagon on the weekends. Now it was an actual building and probably the most popular farm-fresh stand in Oklahoma. She made good bank and paid Sam and Mason well for the work they did.

Maybe she hadn’t always wanted to be a farmer, but she’d made it something she loved, and that had made it a success. Sam loved it, too.

He loved his home best of all at exactly this moment: when the daytime world was buttoned up tight, and every building, tree, and fence post was only a shadow against the darkening sky. Tonight, with a sliver of moon, that sky was clear and full of stars. Whippoorwills sang, crickets chirped, and frogs peeped. Earthen scents of life wafted on the breeze sweeping the day’s heat away.

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